The Rest Is Politics - 576. How Xi is Outplaying Trump and Tensions in Northern Ireland

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

As Trump becomes the first American president to personally welcome a visiting head of state off a plane since JFK greeted Harold Macmillan in 1962, did his summit with President Xi signal improving US-China relations, or does Xi have his counterpart in an economic chokehold? With the standoff between protesters and members of the pro-British Protestant Orange Order in Northern Ireland showing no sign of resolution, is the region's fragile peace in danger of unravelling? And as violence erupts in Ethiopia, is Africa's second most populous country on the brink of civil war – and does it risk dragging other regional actors into a wider conflict spanning the Horn of Africa and the Gulf? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Research: Evie Townend Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Lorcan Moullier, Oli Ortega, Joe Pettit Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For 40 years, America's answer to China was engage with it, trade with it, invest in it, liberalize it, bring it into the international system. And then almost overnight, Washington seemed to reach a new consensus. Suddenly, 10 years ago, China was presented as the enemy in a new Cold War. And now, Xi Jinping has come to Washington to meet Trump. Red carpets, a state dinner, an extension of the trade truce. A major arms package for Taiwan has been put on. hold. And Trump didn't seem especially interested in containing or confronting China. He seemed interesting getting along with Xi. So what's going on? Is Trump an outlier in an America which is

still committed to confrontation? Or is American policy lurching back towards compromise? Because America no longer wants to be the global policeman of the order it once built. This episode is powered by fuse energy. Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing. Not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff a roll on, which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year. But the apathy goes deeper than our bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy's expensive, the system's outdated, but that complacency is costing us. Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else.

Fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy and right now its tariffs are up to £100 below the off-gem price cap. So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company and it only takes you three minutes. Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy.com slash politics, use the code politics and you'll get a free trip plus subscription allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members content that Alastair and I are now producing for you. visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.

Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap to blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into the special. And digger's going to dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the revenant.

What would happen if I stop doing? You starve. You freeze to death. That's what? With great power comes great deniability. I'm not the earth, Danny. See the trailer online. Only the years October 2nd. Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Aleister Campbell. So, amazing range of listeners' questions today, touching on some incredibly serious issues. We begin with questions around US and China, that great G2 confrontation after Trump's meeting with Xi. We're then going to talk about some of the very troubling news that's come out of Northern Ireland with the parades. We're talking about Ethiopia, which has broken into war again. We're talking about the Brazil elections, that huge country, where Bolsonaro's son seems to be in the running. And then we'll finish with a bit of lighter stuff around the Bayer tapestry and Alistair's hero, one of his many heroes, Jorgon Klopp, and his positive vision for German patriotism. Holly, what do we actually learn from the Chinese president's visit to Washington?

and what was going on beneath the surface, and who do you think came out on top? My votes on Xi. Well, I think, firstly, not a great deal happened at the summit, so people who thought was going to be a great breakthrough on AI safety would have been disappointed. But I think the summit is really important for what it represents about US-China policy, given these are the two most powerful wealthiest economies in the entire world. And what it shows us is that Trump may be the outlier now in US-China policy. So basically, as everybody I think will have picked up, the US was very, very pro-engagement

with China from the moment of Nixon goes to China, 1970s, right the way through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, China joins the World Trade Organization, right the way through to the middle of Obama. the idea was that engagement, basically the bet was, would make China more liberal and a better player in the international order. And then at the end of Obama, beginning of First Trump, there was a really dramatic change where almost all the China analysts in the US switched from being pro-engagement to suddenly portraying China as the enemy in a new Cold War. And the great consensus emerged, Democrats, Republicans, that China was the enemy and needed. to be kept down. And then what we've seen in this summit is something really startling. Who knew? You know, the very Donald Trump who presided over a government that was one of the most hawkish on China that massively cut all connections with China in the first term now seems in the second term

to be much more friendly towards China than any of the major figures in either the Republican or the Democratic Party. Over to you. Yeah, and there are lots of reasons for that. One of them, let's start by suggesting that actually he comes at this with a more strategic and intelligent mindset than we often give him credit for, that he understands that China is in a very, very dominant position in relation to rare earths, that the US military and the US administration are going to need an awful lot of them, not least because he's going to need them for the Iran war, which shows very little sign of slowing down. But I also think that, there is another point which he does genuinely seem to have a lot of time for dictators.

We're talking at a time when he seems to think his priorities are to launch yet another attack on Canada, which he'd done recently, and also to comment on the bail conditions that are put upon suspects in anti-terrorist, counter-terrorism cases in the UK. At a time when Vladimir Putin has just whacked a load of bombs on a medical facility bang in the middle of Keeve. So I think that you know there was one extra, the whole trip I agree with you there wasn't much of substance that came out of it but the the pageantry

and the kind of the gift to Xi of something that he could sell very very powerfully back home. I think I'm right in saying that this is the first time ever that an American president has been to visit, has been to welcome the visiting head of government or state off the plane

since JFK did that. for Harold McMillan at a time when Britain was the great power. So that's him basically saying that China is the great power. And, you know, we said last week that of the two big events on the foreign policy agenda going on last week, Unger, the United Nations General Assembly, was deemed to be less significant than this meeting. And yet, very little came out of this meeting. And it's interesting you used the word truce. I think there is a bit of a truce in relation to trade. Now, is that about getting through the midterms? Is that about just him worrying that he's got to get these rare earth deals sorted out before then? And then I think my final

point for going back to you, Rory, is just what was said or was not said about Taiwan, because there were very different redouts. The Chinese readout of the meeting gave the impression that Trump was inching towards their side in relation to. Taiwan, the American readout said absolutely nothing about Taiwan. Well, the Taiwan thing, I think, is maybe the moment where everything gets most revealed. The American support for Taiwan is a sort of historical accident in some ways. As Trump himself has pointed out to the fury of many, Taiwan is many, many thousands of miles from the United States, and it's only 70 miles from China. And the diplomatic compromise has circled around language about Taiwan being part of China.

Of course, to remind people, it was simply a contiguous island with China for most of its history. And it ended up under a separate government because the nationalist government fled there when the communist took over China. The US ended up being anchored around there, partly because of its presence during the Korean War. And the US increasingly saw itself as a persistent. power. And the Chinese may not have liked it, but their economy was so tiny compared to the American economy through the 50s, 60s and 70s. I mean, as I keep saying that everyone's incredibly bored, the Chinese economy was still smaller than the Italian economy in 2004. Nobody's bored, Roy. Nobody's bored, nobody's bored with that. That is really interesting.

Nobody's bored. Don't do down your facts. Don't do down my facts. So the Chinese had to put up with the fact that the U.S. was effectively behaving around the coast of China, as though this was American home waters, despite being, you know, what is it, almost 9,000 miles away. And a lot of the things that the Americans would have thought was completely unacceptable in Cuba. You know, the Americans were always complaining that the Russians and Chinese can put spy stuff in Cuba to spy on the Americans. Of course, the Chinese feel with Taiwan, right? Here's the sort of forward American intelligence base right off the coast of China. So there was a natural sense that if you put that,

together with the fact that Xi Jinping, like most Chinese nationalists, see this as an inherent part of China and something should be coming back to China, that they would begin to challenge what the US was doing that and say to the US, how much national interest have you really got there? And the answer from the US used to be, or at least since Taiwan became a democracy, we're standing up for this democratic government, we're standing up for the rules-based international order. And that's why we're going to spend a lot of money defending Taiwan. But the question, of course, that Trump raises, is given that he doesn't seem in Ukraine to care very much about standing up for democracies and the rule-based international order, why would he continue indefinitely doing that in Taiwan? And will Trump inevitably, as he moves away from the idea that America is the global policeman standing up for global democracy, conclude that actually Taiwan could be part of China if it weren't for the fact that it had 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors chip? They've got 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors. China's got a chokehold on rare earths, and he's probably worrying about that much more than he is about the democratic or otherwise future of Taiwan. There was even reports flying around

that he'd asked Xi in these meetings whether China would like to buy weapons from the United States. Now, I don't know whether he's aware of that. That is against the law in America. Now, I know he doesn't care too much about the about the rural law. But if that is true, that is kind of mind-blowing. And again, suggest that he feels himself to be in a very weak position vis-à-vis China. We would have said two years ago, the one consensus right across Democrats and Republicans is that China is the great competitor,

strategic adversary, or to be less polite, enemy in a new Cold War. And I've been very interesting in this because I know a lot of these people. So, for example, Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, who I know quite well, were key figures, Matt Posterger, particularly in Trump's first administration, framing a very, very much more confrontational policy towards China. And Mike Gallagher was a congressman who ran the Congressional Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and they were writing articles that were celebrated throughout the American foreign policy community, which were much more sort of almost rude and brutal in the way they spoke about the Chinese government and came pretty close.

although they backed off of this in the end, suggesting that what they were going to try to do is hold down China till there was regime change until the whole thing collapsed. And even the more polite academics, people like the American ambassador, Nick Burns in Beijing, was saying, you know, in the long run, this is a question of who rules the world,

and we would rather have a world ruled by America than ruled by China. In that context, Trump, going into this kind of new relationship, if indeed it is a new relationship is really interesting. And I suppose my question to you is, do you think that this means that possibly in two years' time, U.S.-China policy might move back towards engagement and that this moment of confrontation was something started by Trump and ended by Trump?

Or is Trump an anomaly? And that when he goes, the US will get back into a much more confrontational attitude towards China. I mean, it's very, very hard to read that because so much of that would depend on who follows Trump. But I do think there is an emerging new attitude to China that most of the American political establishment doesn't lie, but where Trump seems very, very comfortable. And I think that's what came out. And we talked about going to the airport,

the sort of the pomp and the pageantry, which Xi Jinping loves to show off. He was treated as the only really comparable head of state or government. There was literally none of the talking down to leaders, which Trump normally does. There's something we towards down to them, if anything, he was showing respect. I also thought it was, we very, very rarely see Xi Jinping laugh or smile, other than that sort of, you know, the Winnie the Pooh smile.

If you go on the internet in China and Google Winnie the Pooh, everything has been erased because you're not allowed to say that he looks like Winnie the Pooh. But he did actually smile and almost, I'd say, chuckle when Trump was showing him the array of photographs of previous presidents where, of course, he's put Joe Biden as the autopet. Now, I think, I think Xi Jinping was laughing or finding that amusing, not because of an insult to Joe Biden, although he didn't necessarily like Joe Biden very much, but I think that was to him a moment of, this guy's really not all there. This guy is actually quite easy to deal with. I just have to flash him a bit, smile to him a bit. It's very hard to, even if you, even if you

read the White House read out of this meeting. It's very, very hard. They can point to a bit of coal export. They can point to a couple of deals. But there's very little in this that you could say merits the idea that this would be projected as the most important foreign policy meeting of the year. Although they've got two more coming up quite soon, of course. He is going to go to China and Xi is also coming back to the States for a bigger multilateral meeting. As Tony Blair would say, we don't want in all of this to under-emphasize why the U.S. foreign policy establishment is so suspicious of China. Because in some ways, China is a much wealthier, more successful version of Putin's Russia. Like Putin's Russia, it's pretty paranoid about the West.

It believes it's being encircled. It's very worried about color revolutions. It's got no desire to liberalize. It doesn't really want to be a constructive player in the rules-based international order. It's got wounded pride. It sees itself as having a right to great power status. And, of course, it does engage in industrial espionage. It's got some pretty phenomenal capacity.

It engages in economic extortion of its allies. The problem is that that story was easier to sell during Biden because the US was better at presenting itself then. as the great example of democracy. I mean, Nick Burns whole story, you'd rather be ruled by a world, ruled by America, than China doesn't feel the same after two years of Trump. Because now people say, well, okay, you're accusing China of doing economic extortion, you know, so bullying Australia by stopping imports from Australia.

But wait a sec, aren't you bullying everybody around the world with your own tariffs and protection? And you're accusing China of undermining the rules-based international order, but there are you trashing the UN, turning off the aid system, lining up with autocrats. So it's difficult or more difficult than it was for the US to create the alliances that it needs, or at least to create them around values. You know the other day, Rory, I did a bit of pedultery. Well, I don't know with this council, buttultery. I was with Robert Peston from the rest of his money, and Anita Anand from Empire.

And we were doing an event at Lloyds of London for Starr, one of the big, this big American, financial institution. And I did my question, which, as you know, I'd love to ask people, which is the greater threat to global stability, USA or China. And there were a lot of Americans, there was a huge audience, and there were a lot of Americans among the Brits and other Europeans who were there. And I think some of them were genuinely shocked just how one side of the answer was to say that actually the USA is currently the greatest threat. And I think China's playing into that all the time. I think they're doing it in terms of their hard power and their soft power. Holly's question about, you know, who got the most out of this, even on the optics,

which Trump is normally very, very good at, I think Jijing Ping will have gone home very, very happy. What did you make of panda diplomacy, by the way, Rory? You know there was a time was one of my favourite, I can't remember who cracked the lion. It might have been Alex Salmon, but somebody cracked the great lion. There are now more pandas in Scotland. There are Tories where there were two pandas that be given to Scotland. And then in 2015, there were twice as many pandas as the world Labour MPs as well.

Yeah. Yeah. The joke, which Labor Party, I remember being there when he cracked the joke. I think it's sort of a 2010 joke. It's after the catastrophe of the 2010 election, and I think it's an Alex Salmon joke. So, Pand diplomacy, and Pandas feature all the time, don't they? Because part of the whole Nixon goes to China thing, this amazing shift towards embracing communist China in the 1970s, for all the complicated reasons that

Cassandra Nixon wanted to do it was a lot about these strange cultural exchanges. We've talked in the past about ping-pong diplomacy, but also kissing as disdressing as a desire to really get lots of business exchange, student exchange, cultural exchange. And the pandas are, you know, one of the most dramatic things. I mean, the Chinese withdraw panders from people if they've been criticized. They did. When Obama met Dalai Lama, they said, oops, don't like that. We're bringing the pandas back. I mean, look, I know pandas are absolutely gorgeous. And actually, one of the, I'm up in Liverpool, as you know, and one of the meetings I had this week was with the World of Wildlife Fund. And they've got that wonderful.

panda as there, and this is a wonderful, wonderful creature. I saw this survey that, you know, 28% of Americans said they would have a more favorable view of China if they sent a panda to their zoo. Why? Why? I think partly because there's such a social media phenomenon, I mean, that we all feel like pandas because pandas spend their whole time sort of falling off things and ending up their heads and buckets of water in generally. Yeah. The two that would be giving are called Ping Ping and Fu Shwang. Very good. So they're going to become major global celebrities.

Final thing on American views of China, startling shift in American public opinion towards China. And I wonder whether it's going to shift back again. But if you took a snapshot in 2023 from Pew Research, favorability of China went from 50% in 2006 to 12% in 2023. And from 30% of Americans thinking China was the enemy in 2006 to 80% thinking China was the enemy in 2023. So interesting, maybe that'll tie into your panda point. And interesting also whether Trump, who is the great political entrepreneur in many ways, senses the shift in public opinion where people are less interested in the idea of China as the enemy and are more interested in internal

than external enemies. Yeah, you've talked a lot about the sort of the economic consequence of China. And, you know, we've talked a lot recently about Germany. And one of the big things I think driving the difficulties for the German government is the extent to which China, in terms of its exports into our market and markets around the world, has moved up from all the kind of made in China, cheap t-shirts, hats and all that stuff, into high-end quality, high-value production, not least in the automobile industry. And that, again, didn't really, we didn't really get a sense from Trump of sort of trying to push back on what is a very aggressive, very assertive export policy. Yes, although, of course, America has much higher tariffs than places like Britain has.

And I think the big challenge for Europe, I mean, let's imagine you're Germany. On the one hand, you're getting killed by Chinese imports, and that's the stuff we've talked about in the past, which is China's not playing fair in terms of its currency. It's not playing fair in terms of industrial subsidies, and that's now beginning to wipe out German industry. But until quite recently, German industry felt it was a real beneficiary of low tariffs for China because it was selling an enormous amount of BMWs and Mercedes to China at a premium rate, 50% of the profits of luxury goods and automobile manufacturers in China. And Britain is now sort of

caught in the middle of this. We've talked about Andy Vernon in the main episode, but one of the things, of course, that he's struggling with is how we define a new relationship with Europe. And this is partly about customs union. And in Britain at the moment, I think something like 16% of all new cars bought this year were Chinese cars. I mean, Chinese electric vehicles are subsidized or technologically advanced, whatever, they are much cheaper and better than our getting stated. They can recharge a battery in four and a half minutes in the latest models in China. And one of the things that Europe will be asking is for Britain to put much higher tariffs up against, which, of course, will hit customers and make it more difficult to do the energy

transition to electric vehicles. So China's in the center of every single conversation, and we need to keep coming back to China. Listen, this whole story about the new existential threats we're facing, and particularly global choke points, if anybody's not listened to my members' series, which has done some great stuff with Yuval No Harari on AI, Carlo Rovelli on nuclear war, we're now this week talking to Edward Fisherman about this new global choke points, which is a huge story that's becoming more and more relevant with what we're just seeing, not just in Hormuz, but in the Red Sea.

Yeah, finally, I did a couple of events here with Hamish Fortner, who's the minister in charge of trying to get a better deal with the European Union post-Brexit. And we should probably come back to this and do it in detail at some point. This made in Europe stuff that is causing real difficulties now, I think, between the UK and the European Union. Because there's the European Union, which sees itself as Europe. And then there are countries like us, like the UK and others who are really in danger of getting really whacked by this thing. So we should come back to that and do it properly another day. Great.

Well, Alison, here's a question very much for you from Louis. Can you explain the context of what's going on Northern Ireland right now? Why was the peace process so tested and strained this weekend? Oh, I mean, this brought back some absolutely terrible memories. Drum Cree and the marching in Drum Cree, which, I mean, to get the sort of full story of this, you've got to go back to the Battle of the Boyne. It's a long, long time ago. We don't want to go right back to the Battle of the Bion.

We're talking about 1690. And then the Orange Order was founded in 1795 and not far from Drum Cree. And this is very much regarded as the birthplace of the whole orangism, if you like. And as you know, they've got this history and tradition of marching. And this is one of the most famous and most controversial marches because we're talking about this town. And Alist, just quickly to state the obvious, again, for international listeners, these are unionist pro-British Protestants predominantly. Yeah.

So the Battle of Boyne, essentially, was what led to the continuation of the Protestants being ascendant in Ireland. And this focuses on a town called Porterdown, which is mainly Protestant, but it has this significant Catholic minority. And the issue is about the march that they do, this drum creme march going through this very, very Catholic area. And I think in our very first week in 1997, there'd been this murder. of a guy called a local Catholic, a guy called Robert Hamill, he'd been kicked to death by a gang of loyalists on the main street.

And in the march which followed, there was a lot of sort of mimicking, stamping on the ground, as though they were sort of reminding the Catholics that they'd done this. Moe Moe-Molem's Secretary of State, she let the march proceed, and it led to astonishing, horrible violence. And this went on year after year. Drum Cree became every year we had to deal with this drumcree march. And honestly, you think the Prime Minister has got a lot to deal with. There were some years when we would be like this would be at top of our agenda for day after day after day. And then we passed legislation, the Public Possessions Act, which led to the Parades Commission. Since when there have been, there's a lot of violence, I was looking at the numbers in 1998, for example,

just as a result of this attempt to have the march going through this one road, 615 attacks on the security forces, 76 police injured, 632 petrol bombs, 45 homemade bombs, 24 shooting incidents, almost 500 vehicles attacked, 284 arrests. And then we had the horrible murder of three young Catholic boys, aged 8, 9 and 10. So eventually this was banned. And what's happened this year is that it was banned again for July. But then there was an appeal and the High Court allowed it to go ahead under certain conditions. Okay. Since when massive protests by the residents of the Garvaki Road,

the Orange Lodge have been doing the march, but then going into a police wall, and there's currently a bit of a standoff and Chris Bryant, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is trying to get the two sides together. But the reason it brought back such memories is because this is just one of those things that you hoped with the peace process might just have taken a bit of a back seat, but these old traditions, they keep coming out. One of the things that's very difficult for an outsider to make sense of is this question of how fragile the peace is or isn't.

I mean, you can go to Derry-Londonderry, and people will say, listen, this is still on the edge of a tinderbox. But in other ways, things seem to have changed so much in the last 25 years. I mean, very difficult, but just sort of gut instinct, what's your sense of the next five, 10 years in Northern Ireland? Are you terrified that it's about a collapse again, or do you see this as a bit of an anomaly and that, broadly speaking, we're getting more peaceful all the time? I think broadly speaking, yes, but I think that we've seen too many of these incidents where you can see the extent to which it wouldn't take much for violence to erupt.

Now, whether we'd ever get back to the scale of violence and the scale of organized violence, I'm not so sure. I would be reasonably optimistic about that. But I think what it shows, you and I've talked before about whether we shouldn't have tried to have in the Northern Ireland process, something similar as they had in South Africa, you know, truth and reconciliation. Because what you're seeing with these is you're seeing a new generation. When you see, okay, when you see the Orange Order guys marching, they tend to be a bit older.

But then when you see the Residents Association and the Garvachie Road protests, you've got a lot of younger people. And then when you've seen, we saw some violence recently that was much more done by the Protestant side of things. And that was a younger generation. So you've got a younger generation that has grown up not knowing the violence as a fact of life. But you can see that the kind of cultural pressures and the historical pressures are still there. So I think Chris Bryant's a Northern Ireland secretary. he's got a tough job in his hands right now. And don't forget we have this, we have this coalition,

which is what we put in place with the Good Friday Agreement. You know, the whole purpose was to have the two sides governing together. And, you know, so I'd say, I'd say this is tense. But the marching season is always tense. The marching season is always tense. But this felt, this week felt like a bit of a throwback. And I think we've got to keep very, very focused on this and make sure that it doesn't spiral into something much, much worse.

Well, I think time for a quick break. And when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about a situation where genuinely a peace agreement has collapsed and a civil war has broken out again. And that's Ethiopia. We're also going to touch on Jürgen Klopp, the Bayer Tapestry and the Brazil elections. Very good. See you soon. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's. One thing that politics teaches you is that certainty, predictability is often an illusion. At Lloyd's Market Summit early this month, I sat down with Cathy Kay from the rest of its politics, US,

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He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody. It's Dominic Sambrick here from The Rest Is History. And we are here to tell you about a thrilling new series on the Blood So climax of the French Revolution, the reign of terror. So the French Revolution is one of the most significant episodes in the whole of world history.

It essentially lays the foundations for contemporary politics as we know it, but it is also unbelievably dramatic. We'll be discussing the murder of the firebrand Jean-Pour Marais in his bathtub. We will be going to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. And in our final episode, we will be telling the story of the extraordinary, grotesque downfall of one of the chief architects of the terror, one of the most evil men in history, some would say, Maximilier Crobespierre. So if you want to hear this epic series, search for The Rested History, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to The Restis Politics Question Time with me, Alecester Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart. Okay, Rory, Nicol in Glasgow, how worried are you by the reignition of tensions and the possibility of full-scale war in Ethiopia and Eritrea? Which regional actors could this drag in around the Horn of Africa and the Gulf? And will the international community continue to stand idly by if another humanitarian crisis emerges? Let's start with the sort of basic facts. So there was an incredible shift, Ethiopia, which was in many ways the kind of darling of the West, the great developmental state, because it was. was gone from extreme poverty and had a relatively stable government. You know, this would have been true when Tony Blair was in. This would have been true almost right the way through to me

as an Africa minister in 26, 2017, growing at 8% a year, then collapsed into a very, very nasty civil war. Really attentive listeners will remember that Alist and I covered the Ethiopian Civil War, which was really a fight between people from Tigray in the Highland North, a traditional governing group of Ethiopia for many of the last decades and the new government of Abiyahmed, the federal government, which was resolved by something called the Pretoria Accords, which brought peace at the end of 2022. Since then, the Tigray group split, hardliners took over and a new coalition has emerged, an unusual coalition where some of Abiy Ahmed's key allies, both ethnic groups inside Ethiopia and the Eritreans that he were relying on last time now seemed to have swapped side,

It's in an unstable coalition with Tigray, and now the fighting is breaking out again, and lots of things follow on from that, including are they going to be able to cut off the access to Djibouti, which is Ethiopia's only access to the sea? Hundreds of thousands of people died in the last conflict. Is that going to begin again? And what does this mean for the broader region? Now, remember that it's coming unstuck at almost the same time as the peace deal in Yemen, which had kept pretty static front lines since 2022.

also came unstuck just a few weeks ago with the Houthi storming down the side of the Red Sea. And that raises a whole series of questions. One of them for Ethiopia itself, which, you know, is a country which you, I think, recently in the newsletters, is one of your favorite countries in the world and posted some lovely pictures of yourself in Ethiopia. But it's an enormous place, 160 million odd people. It's the great land-based market for all of the Horn of Africa ports. But this is also a story, as nickel implies, which stretches much, much further. Because what's happened is now the Houthi have come all the way down the side of the Red Sea.

And you now need to look at both sides of the Red Sea in order to see this whole new unfolding problem, a real geographical problem. Because you've got the states down the Arabian side of the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia down into Yemen, with the Houthi now control. controlling one side, and then down the other side, you've got this chain of states which runs down from Egypt through Sudan, I hope I'm not going to miss anything here, Eritrea, Djibouti, what's now been recognized by Israel as Somaliland, and then the Somali province of Puntland. And what's really interesting there is that you've had the United Arab Emirates trying to position itself all the way along that coast with port deals, most of which have begun going horribly wrong. So if we go stage by stage, they backed the RSF in Sudan, and so the Sudanese military

has taken control of the port that UAE had there. Djibouti kicked them out. Eritrea's now turned against the Emirates, apparently in favor of Egypt. The Somali government under pressure from Saudi Arabia has now said they don't want any UAE ports. And so they're clinging on to this funny enclave, which is the sort of UAE Israel enclave, around independent, Somaliland, and they're facing against them a coalition which feels like a sort of Saudi, Egyptian, potentially Turkish-Sudanese coalition with Ethiopia, with UAE and everyone else with the other lot. Now, that's a complicated story, but where am I getting to here?

Where I'm getting to here is this is the collapse of the global order in miniature, and it's the beginning. It's just the beginning. We've seen the Yemen peace deal collapsing a couple of weeks ago. we're seeing the Ethiopian peace deal collapsing. Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the South Sudan relative peace that we've had since 2016 is also about collapse that's just on the other border. And where is America and all this? Where is Europe in all this? Because what you've got is American allies fighting each other. And America completely unable to define what its national

interests are, which should be pretty clear, should be an open red sea and support nation states, instead of which they are allowing Israel and UAE to essentially encourage failed states, breakaway states, strange groups in order to create this network of alliances and ports. Nichols' question about where is the international community in all this is the right one? And you could say, well, there are so many conflicts going on

and nobody can be expected to be across them all. And that historically has been the role of the United Nations. We talked about this last week. the chief purpose of the United Nations has been peace and security, okay? And what you've just described there is an area where there's been a history of conflict, but then there have been periods of relative peace and security. And one of the reasons for that is that at the right time, the international community has found ways of becoming properly engaged.

And we're now in this world of Trump and of China and of Putin, and we're just, we don't have. I'd like to think that both Andy Burnham and Emmanuel Macron, the other two leaders of the permanent five of the United Nations, do care about this, do understand white matters to all of us, but they alone are not going to be able to drive an international response to it. And it's, you know, I don't know if I said it was one of my favorite countries in the world. I said it was one of the, I think it's one of the, I saw it's the most beautiful.

I think it's a beautiful country. my my first experience of it was back covering the famine in the 80s in Ethiopia and then Eritrea and Tigray. There's a famous photograph of you with the leader of Eritrea that we always have to keep bringing up. No one it's not a famous photograph. It's a photograph that you like because it shows me as a young man looking rather fawningly at this handsome freedom fighter. A gorilla leader, exactly. Freedom fighter, as we call him. as we called it at the time, who we thought was going to deliver a peaceful,

democratic, and he's now become one of the world's longest-serving dictators. You can't get every judgment right, Roy, okay? But anyway, I did find that conflict and that war astonishingly interesting. And Eritrea is a beautiful part of the world. I mean, you see horrific, you know, you see a lot of poverty, we at that time saw a lot of violence, a lot of death.

And you had the EPLF, Eritrean People's Liberation, Front. And you had the TPLF, the TIGRae People's Liberation Front. And of course, you talked about Abiyadh's Nobel Prize. That was because of reconciling coming to peace with Eritrea. But of course, it didn't take long before he was then fighting a war with Tigray. And of course, you taught Ethiopia is a huge country, but at the same time, it has real difficulties in terms of access to the sea, and that has been a cause of a lot of the sort of difficulties that they've that they've had. But I, look, I just, I just wish we could get back to a place where an issue like this, both in terms of political interest around the world and media interest

as well, because without those two things, these things just fall off the agenda and chaos becomes normalized, and that's what I worry is going to happen here. Well, the change is unbelievable, isn't it? Because from the civil war that you were reporting in the 80s and the rise of the sort of Eritrean Che Guevara as he appeared through to the 90s and 2000s. The 90s and 2000s, we sort of thought, the world sort of thought it had a model, didn't it, for dealing with this? It would have talked about the African Union coming in, the UN, IGAD, which was a coordination structure.

We would have been talking about the developmental state. We would have been talking about justice. We would have been thinking about governance reforms. And it looked pretty good for a bit, right? as though this story was sort of working in the 90s and 2000s. Yes, we were worrying about Somali pirates. Yes, we were worrying about terrorism, but we were not at that stage imagining because they didn't really count. Nobody was talking about the Gulf states. I mean, what's really changed? I remember this in Somalia turning up as the Africa minister in 2016. I sort of

feel I was at the beginning of seeing what had happened. I turned up in Somalia where Britain was still talking as though it was the major player or one of the major major players in Somalia, because I guess we probably had been very influential, probably just a couple of years earlier. By the time I turned up, the Turks were everywhere, the Emirates were everywhere, and you could already sense things shifting very, very, very, very quickly. And Britain mattered less and less. The US still mattered, but Britain matter less. Now, where does that mean that we go now? Well, I think just the brutal numbers are shocking. The Uppsala Institute that manages this now says that we have over 60 live conflicts in the world,

which is the most that they've measured in any time since 1945. So before anyone gets the impression that we're just suffering from some global derangement syndrome and that actually everything's going in the right direction, the statistics suggest this is not an anomaly at all. This is what happens when the global order begins to fray. Why did you say, you said it's been very interesting when you were going through the only. did you say that you thought that South Sudan could be the next? What's going on there that I haven't been across? Well, so South Sudan has these very, very deep residual conflicts going on between the Nour and the Dinka, particularly two of the big ethnic groups that play into this,

and particularly between two of the leading figures, particularly a guy called Riekma Shah. And that seemed a little bit like Yemen, and I guess a little bit like Somalia and probably, at times a little bit like Ethiopia, a conflict that was almost indefinitely going to continue because it felt like nor known, felt like there were all these deep historical roots and so many people have been killed and it was so savage. And then oddly, a semi-stailmate emerged, which meant that for some years over the last few years, it's been much, much less bad than the world that we saw in the late teens. And it now feels to me that these things, spill very, very quickly across borders. You know, all these players that I'm talking about,

Israel, UAE, Saudi, Egypt, Turkey, some cases with Iranian drones or Chinese drones, are now major players in disrupting Libya. They're major players in a lot of these things that we've been talking, these coup d'etas across the Sahel. So Chad is very much connected with UAE. And if people look at South Sudan on the map, the likelihood of things spilling over again from Sudan or Ethiopia into South Sudan seems to be really strong. And that's before you get on to insurgency in the DRC. I mean, I don't want to be too grumpy about this. And I'm also worried that in trying to predict where the next sort of semi-peace deal settlements collapse, I'm missing other things. I mean, I still remain

very concerned about the fact that if I were Iran, I would be trying to same. a ship in Suez, now that you've closed Hormuz and the Red Sea, closing the next checkpoint. And this is also funny. It's partly a technology point. It's partly a point about the fact that the US has lost partly because of drones, its real ability to prevent relatively weak states or even insurgency groups doing extraordinary things to each other, to shipping. And drones keep popping up in all these stories. The Tigray front was basically blocked from its advance on artists by drones paid for by UAE and bought from Turkey, Iran and China. I think that's the kind of stuff that will drive into South Sudan.

But I also think we may be looking too much in Africa and we may see stuff happening in Asia and Latin America as well. Saudi Dan's landlocked, isn't it? Like Ethiopia. Both landlocked. Yes, absolutely. Alison, quick question for you, because you've been following this closely. Josh, what do you make of the upcoming elections in Brazil? that seem neck and neck between Lula and Flavia,

who I think is the son of Bolsonaro, the old populist right-wing leader. What I make of them is that they are neck and neck. It's a very, very, very, very foolish man who's going to bet his house on the outcome. I think until recently, I think there was a sense that the Bolsonaro mythology with the dad in jail

and lots of difficulties between the son and his step-mom, who's also campaigning to be an elected representative as well, I'd love to know how much the Americans are back, getting involved in, you know, because we've seen the extent to which the Americans like to get involved in these Latin American elections. And the reason why they, well, this matters because Brazil is a huge country. Lula and Claudius Chambheim in Mexico are really the only two left from the left who are facing up to this sort of right-wing wave. And of course, Bolsonaro is senior.

he's serving a lot of very long prison sentence for doing something that Donald Trump got away with which is basically trying to resist the outcome the democratic outcome of an election that was held his son Flavio is the candidate Flavio but it's clear there was a very very good piece in the FT magazine at the weekend it's clear that the dad is still very very powerful in the whole the whole setup Flavio is even on record as saying you know he's not these words but he's I'm basically not fit to tie his shoelaces. He's the man kind of thing.

And of course, Lula is, I don't know his exact age, but he's pretty much in the Trump generation. He's certainly 80 plus, as it were. You know, you've also got the elections to the Chamber of Deputies. There's a huge election across the weekend. I think rather than speculate now, probably best if we come back to it next week when we actually know what the outcome will be. And it's probably going to be some sort of runoff, but I wouldn't put my money on Lula holding on. And I think it'd be pretty grim for democracy if A. Bolsonaro came back.

Warring, we'll keep an eye on that. And as you say, it's interesting how successful, from Trump's point of view, he must feel that he's being all the way from Venezuela across to Argentina and all these elections. He seems to be getting a sort of full slate of his sort of El Salvador vision of Latin America. Although, of course, some of my more right-wing Latin American friends would disagree with me and say that, We've been too sympathetic towards hopeless left-wing populist leaders across Latin America. That's a bigger conversation. Rory, here's one for you, because I know the answer to this from your perspective.

Linda, will you be going to see the Bayer Tapestry? I've been invited to a couple of things that I've not been able to do, but I know you have been. So was it worth the visit? Went with Shoshana and children, absolutely worth the visit. I love the British Museum, so I'm not going to hit them too hard on the organisation, But just, spoiler alert, if like us, you go out three in the afternoon, you're waiting a very, very long time because they still haven't sorted out how you move down that tapestry so that you don't end up waiting a long time even when you've booked your time slot on your tickets. That's aside, I mean, the tapestry is incredible. It's, I mean, the first thing which you'd love, I think, Alistair, is it's an amazing exercise in storytelling.

Because somebody's sitting down not long after the Battle of Hastings was having to work out how do you. do you tell the story in pictures? It's basically a graphic novel or a cartoon strip of what happened. And they're having to choose very dramatically. You know, okay, let's start with Edward confessors sending off Harold off to Northern France and then he's getting captured and then he's fighting with William and then an oath is given and then Edward's handing over the throne and he's crowned and now the boats are coming across and now the horses are gathering and the archers. And that's the first thing. The second thing is it's actually an amazingly innovative piece of art. I mean, I can't think of any other medieval art before that, which actually tells the story in that way. It's more like Trajan's Column, or maybe the, if you go to the British Museum, more like the Elgin Marbles or something, and the way that it gets the freeze going all the way along, rather than the sort of blocky stories that you'd expect in a medieval manuscript. So really exciting. And I think such a great decision to bring it over, because so few people were seeing it in.

Bayer, and it means so much to us. And I think means maybe even more to us in an age where we love graphic novels and cartoons to see. And also, Alisa, I promise you, you will be able to read all the Latin all the way across, even just on the base of your French. It's a wonderfully simple medieval Latin. So do you think we should keep it like we kept the elegant marble? Should we do that? Finders, keepers, losers, weepers. What are they going to do? What are they going to do? Are they going to come and get it? Honestly, what are they going to do? Well, that sounds good. How long did it take you to get around?

I mean, you said, and should we complain to, isn't George Osborne the head of the British museum? We should complain to him about the organisation. He is, and Tom Holland, our great co-presenter in rest of history is the trustee, and doubtless they will accuse me for being bitter that I'm not the chair or the trustees, but I do think, here's an idea for the British Museum, if you're listening, if you're not prepared to put a moving staircase, which is what they have at the Tower of London to keep people moving through crown jewels.

A simple thing you could do is you could just have a rope with knots in it and everyone has to cling on to their bit of the rope and then everyone would move in time because actually the problem is the gaps that emerge between people. I mean that it's the day goes on. Can you take pictures? No, they won't let you take pictures anymore because that's one of the things

they're blaming on the cues. So they've stopped pictures and videos. But the solution... But you could take pictures before. There's not a sort of reason why you can't photograph. No, no, you could before. It's just that as they're becoming more and more panicked by people like me grumbling about the fact that they're waiting an hour and a quarter beyond their time and missing their kids' birthday party, which is what happened with me and I, they're trying to work out what it is. I have a solution. An old-fashioned rope with knots in it, cling

onto the rope, and then everybody would move together, shoulder to shoulder at the same speed. Okay, right. Okay, so this is very much an answer to question. Yurgen Klopp, recently spoke about reclaiming the flag for ordinary Germans through what he calls positive patriotism, arguing that national pride should not be left to political extremes. Do you think public figures, particularly in sport, can successfully separate patriotism from nationalism or is reclaiming national symbols from political movements much harder and practice? That's an ideal, Alistair question, isn't it? That's positive sense of national pride and football altogether.

Go on. Over to you. Well, it's got football. It's got one of the most charismatic public figures on the planet who happens to be German, but who's well known in England because he was manager of Liverpool, where I am now. And it's also got a really good opportunity to lay into the populist far right. So, Jorg and Klopp, this is really interesting. He's become the manager of Germany, Germany, which has been struggling, football-wise,

and he turned up for his inaugural press conference as the manager, he always wears a baseball cap and a new baseball cap. And it basically was a sort of modern version of the flag and the slogan was one of 80 million, something like that. And he sort of said, I'm not going to get political. I'm not going to be political. But he basically, without mentioning the alternative for Deutschland, he kind of said he was sick and tired of the flag being, you know, taken by the extremes. And he said the one thing that football can do is actually that, you know, we can all unite around the flag as the symbol of our country. I also sort of. a really interesting interview with him this week. I had no idea about this. He was asked why he always seemed to be so positive. And he said, because he had a fantastichie family. Can you get that one, right? We can translate that. Yeah, that's a bit like the Latin on the Bayer tapestry. We can get there. Okay. So you've got a fantastichie familia. Yeah. And also, I'm a gluebiger Christus. Is he Christian? I'm a believer in Christ, yeah, which I had no idea. So he said they were the twin things that drove him. Anyway, that's nothing to do with patriotism. But I thought that was very

interesting. Anyway, answer to your question, Matt. Yes, is the answer. Because this is something that the extremes often do, mainly the extremes of the right rather than the left, but they, they seize, they try to pretend that they alone represent the patriotic voice. And I would argue at the moment that there's a case to be made for attacking the far right, not least in our country, where we now have the reform who call the RNLI, note the word royal national life, lifeboat institution, a migrant taxi service, who regularly attack the police, who on the back of the recent arrests at Fairford, as ever, just used it to try to sort of, you know, make this somehow about immigration. So I just think that there is a, there is a positive patriotism,

which is you love your country, but you want your country to be better. And there is a negative patriotism to me, which is a divisive patriotism. This is that only if you follow my sort of politics, Farage, Rupert Lowe, etc., then only then can you truly be a patriot. So I thought what Klopp did in Germany was good. And of course, Germany's got the same sort of political problems we have at the moment. Well, it's lovely, but he's basically just copied Garrette Southgate. Yeah, good point. Good point. Garrette's Southgate did do something very similar. Another opportunity to plug James Graham's latest play. We loved Garrette's Southgate. Can you get Clop on the show, please. We'll definitely give it a go.

It doesn't do many sort of... Have I seen many podcasts he's done? I'd love to know where he said the thing about Christ. Yeah, we can try to get Yergen Klopp. He's a very, very, very, very, fine man. I've also got a very funny story about Klop. I share his vet. Well, I want to say I share his vet. I have once

shared his vet. Your miniature King Charles Spaniel goes to the same vet that Yorgon Klop's dog went to. Did once. Did once. Because of the ludicrousness of Brexit. Our poor dog, although she doesn't know it, we have got so many passport stamps for our dog. Every time you take your dog to Europe,

you have to go and see a vet before you bring it back. Okay. And so Fiona and I were in Salt in northern Germany, and we took it to the vet. And on the front was a, on the reception desk, was a book. And the book was written by the vet. And the vet, the vet's claims to Faye was that Yorgon Klopp took his dog there when it swallowed a jellyfish.

Oh, that's a really good story. I like that very much. So there you are. Swallied a jellyfish. Yeah, I like that. Anyway, the dog was saved and it's all fine and Yorgans happy. I hope the dog's still happy. And yeah, so there we are. I share Yergan's vet. That's a lovely, lovely thing to end on. Well, Alistair, thank you very much. And I look forward to talking again next week. You're Zoom. Bye.

Hi, it's Rory here. I've been thinking a lot about the big ex-essential questions that we often don't want to address the things that don't feel immediate, but which could actually change our entire world. And I was joined today by Yuval No Harari to discuss what he calls AI imperialism, kill switches, how alien intelligence could soon create a world that we cannot and can never begin to understand. Have a listen. I think we are entering a new age of imperialism, which is radically different

from every previous age of imperialism in history. Because in every previous age, there was a certain inevitable limit to how much power you can concentrate in one place. If you look at the Roman Empire, so the Roman Empire economically, even if it conquers the Homeriterranean, it cannot move, like the main source of economic wealth is ultimately agriculture and wheat

fields, it cannot physically move the wheat fields from Egypt to Italy. And so a lot of power remains in the provinces. If you look at the British Empire, it cannot move the oil fields from Iraq to Yorkshire. It's impossible. So a lot of the power remains in the provinces. With AI, you can move all the assets, which are ultimately just code, to the imperial hub, with really nothing remaining in the provinces. Similarly, if you think about it in military terms, the Roman Empire, if you're a Roman merchant and you sell the latest model of bows to some Picts beyond Adrian Wall, they can then use it against you. There is no button in Rome that you press the button

and all these bows stop working. In the 19th century, if some British merchant sells assault rifles to Afghan tribesmen, they can then use it to do things the British don't like like kill British soldiers.

Victoria doesn't have a magic button that if she presses the button, all these rifles stop working. With AI, this is the case that if you buy your AI drone swarm from the Americans, there is a button in Washington

on that when they press, it stops working. And this means when you have this kind of kill switch, of course, in the extreme case, they press it. But long before they press it, they use the existence of the kill switch to extort and exert their power. Your knowledge that they have the kill switch already means that you have to cooperate. Let's just dig into the economics, though. So imagine I'm running a medical insurance company in Yorkshire, employing lots of people in

small towns and they're working, I don't know, 4,000 of them are call center people, 1,000 of them are software engineers. And an American company, Anthropic or Open AI, develops a new program which replaces all my call center people because suddenly the AI can take the calls and speak very beautifully and replaces all my software coders because now actually the clawed code can do all the work that these people can do in an instant. Now the medical insurance business in this place is being served from the United States with their products, right? And now all these people have lost their jobs, 5,000 call center workers, thousand software engines. Now the government is no longer receiving,

the British government is no longer receiving income tax from these individuals because they don't have an income. In fact, the British government now needs to pay unemployment, welfare benefit to these people. But it's not even able to tax the corporation. The corporation is now in the United States, right? Yes. So the revenue base of the British government collapses. The economic growth is removed. The productivity benefit goes off the United States. And there is a huge sucking sound, like a vacuum cleaner, sucking the wealth of Britain over to the United States. Yes, exactly. So I just wanted to, you know, see if we can develop this a little bit as one of the the risks before we get on to, you know, killer drones of what it could actually mean

for economies like the British or European economy if we end up in a world in which the very latest frontier models are located uniquely in the United States and China and they choose to use those to run the companies themselves rather than allow us to build off the back of them. What is, I mean, what you get, again, it's an extreme imperial economy where the only thing that remains in the provinces are certain raw materials that are still needed and cannot be moved physically. So it's oil, it's rare earth minerals and things like that. Everything which is based on humans, like human intelligence, this can be done from the

hub with AI's. And there's something else, which is also true of the imperial economy, which I didn't understand until I was the African minister. One is tempted to say, and we also have a market. But as we get poorer, our market matters less and less. I remember talking to a businessman about trying to encourage him to invest in Africa. And he said, I'm not investing in sub-Saharan Africa because the entire middle class of sub-Saharan Africa is smaller the population of Belgium. And he defined middle classes having an income of more than $800 a month. So one of the interesting things is that if your economy collapses, you don't actually

have the leverage of saying, you need our market. Yeah, absolutely. And we don't have any precedent for such. economic scenario from history, which is why it's so difficult and going back to the issue of thinking the unthinkable to really come to terms with it. But I think this should be the number one or number two worry of all the countries in the world, except for the two leading ones, the USA and China, which will benefit from this new kind of economics. Okay, here's a here was a story given to me by somebody in Afghanistan. So someone in Afghanistan said,

We don't really need to worry. We barely connects it to the internet. We don't really have very much electricity between Herat and Kabul. We are living a subsistence life as peasant farmers. The United States already tried for 20 years to spend $2 trillion with all the latest technology in the world to try to conquer us, and they gave up and left. We'll be fine. Our life won't change very much. It is true that villagers in Afghanistan in this sense are in a much better situation than lawyers in London, whose life could be, the life is that they know could be completely destroyed. And the villager in Afghanistan, his life not necessarily completely destroyed.

No, not in the short term. In the long run, the danger of a planet dominated by AI is not that the AI will try to unsuccessfully build democracy in Afghanistan, wasting two trillion dollars and, you know, creating so much havoc. The AIs will just not care about the humans. They can go on living, whatever they are doing, until the moment the AIs need something from that particular place, and then they just don't care what is the impact on the humans living there.

The thing is we cannot really imagine the scenarios. If we can imagine them, they are not realistic. As a less intelligent entity, we cannot imagine the concerns, the ambitions, the plans of the more intelligent entities. Like if you live in, I don't know, in some jungle, you're a monkey. And some oil company is coming and destroys your forest to drill for oil. And you cannot imagine what is driving this process. Like you say, are they coming to get my bananas?

And no, no, no, they are not coming to get your bananas. It's just that the price of oil is now 150 because of a war in the Middle East. and therefore it makes sense for them to destroy your forest and you cannot understand it. Well, because, I mean, it's particularly strange in that example, because the monkey has to understand that what they're really interested in is trees and organic matter that rotted 100 million years ago, rather than the trees that are actually standing here, because somehow they're able to set the stuff on fire and generate energy from it to do something. Which they use in order to watch funny cat videos on their smartphones. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was from part two of my conversation with Yuval No Harari. Sign up at therestespolitics.com to hear the whole interview, as well as so much more member content. That's therestespolitics.com.