Special Edition: Zelensky Takes A Direct Strike, The Steel Porcupine, RIP Collingwood
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Welcome to Multipolarity. If this is not the voice you're expecting, it's because we have some bad news for you.

Andrew Collingwood is dead. He has a very bad cold. Took him to his rest. Angels have ferried him there at about 4.15 this afternoon. And yeah, he's phoned in sick for the first time ever. Sorry, folks. Two and a half years into the project, we've had a sickie. So I'm joined here today by Philip Pilkington, geopolitics expert, macroeconomist, etc., etc.,

And there's been an awful lot going on in the world. So I am going to play the knafe and Philip Pilkington is going to play Philip Pilkington and do all of his own stunts. And we are going to talk through Trump, Vance, Zelensky, Ukraine and beyond this sort of nexus, this slow motion explosion that is now radiating out into the world. Philip Pilkington, welcome.

Where were you when you saw the Vance Zelensky clips? I think I was with you in a bar somewhere, actually, if I recall correctly. Or was I on the bus on the way to that bar? I don't know. It was a Friday night. So, I mean, it's natural that an Irishman would be crawling around a bar somewhere. Yeah.

Sure. I mean, I was away, but... Oh, you were away, sorry, you didn't attend. You didn't attend. Attend the best of us. That was the no-goblin party, I forgot. Apologies for making you feel left out and jealous. Well, I was doing cool things. But yes, we were at a bar, actually. A guest of podcast, Carlos Roa, was also there, and we were huddled in the corner watching Zelensky fold his arms.

get angry like a child. What was the reaction amongst your geopolitically attuned group? It's so over.jpg. I mean, it was pretty much that. Like the moment people in geopolitical circles, diplomatic circles, political circles, etc. see something like that, they go, it's finished. I mean, you don't know what's coming next after that, but you know that it's...

a train has been set in motion. Things like that don't happen, I won't say randomly, although they don't happen randomly. I'm not saying that it was a setup on the part of Trump and so on. I don't think it was. But things like that don't happen randomly. They happen when, as a Hegelian might say, the historical process is drawing to a logical conclusion.

So I think it was pretty clear to everyone that I've talked to so far that it is so over .jpg. Okay, you say it wasn't a setup. So just talk us through the social dynamics of what happened there. Not a psychologist, wouldn't make a good one, but I watched the entire clip. It was about 40 minutes, I think.

And the meeting was pretty normal. Look, the JD and Trump were ribbing them. You know, they were, but they'd ribbed Keir Starmer earlier in the week. Probably a little harder than Zelensky, actually. I mean, I thought they made kind of a fool out of Keir Starmer. But, you know, you got to take a bit of a ribbing if you're an adult male in that kind of a...

surrounding, you know, it's clear that the ribbing has a diplomatic purpose. The purpose isn't to make you explode and act like an idiot. So, you know, I think, I don't know, I think the guy kind of just blew up toward the end. Not really clear what triggered them. I mean, it was Vance, obviously, but I don't think Vance did anything particularly

But, you know, Zelensky had been reading the tweets and everything that Trump and Vance had been putting out. Vance is obviously... It's not good cop, bad cop with Trump and Vance. It's like good cop and like evil cop that wants to torture you. And Vance is like the evil cop that wants to torture you. And so I'm not surprised that, you know, psychologically that's where it went. But, you know, he blew up and...

And look, it's not going to change the outcome. What happened at that meeting isn't going to change the outcome, but it is going to make a meaningful difference on the timeline of that outcome. So what Zelensky did there was one of those rare instances where the machinery does actually break down, you know, the machinery of history that we're all Hegelian rationalists. So the machinery of history always moves in a very logical direction.

But there are occasionally kind of times when somebody comes in and monkey ranches the thing and it changes. It speeds things up or it slows things down. And it was definitely one of those moments, I think. Accelerationism, you might say. And what did you make of the press reaction to that? Because it was overwhelmingly negative, but you're painting a picture of inevitability.

European press reaction was very different from the American press reaction. And that's almost the story here. The American press reaction was to blame Zelensky, almost universally. Look, I don't know, maybe some of this ultra liberal publications said that Zelensky's great and that Trump and fans are evil, but that's not the standard line.

I didn't check the New York Times. I probably should have. But I wouldn't be surprised if they took at least a neutral view on it or at very least said that Zelensky was being very undiplomatic. Americans get really mad when you disrespect the boss, you know. It's not really about who the boss is either. Maybe in 2016, 2020, you would have gotten away with heckling Trump or something like that.

But even the way it was done, it was kind of like disrespecting the White House and stuff like that. And America have a bit of a secular religion around their politics. I'm sure people know. So the whole thing was in America was covered very differently from Europe. And in America, it was widely seen as a watershed moment. The likes of Lindsey Graham and Dan Crenshaw turned on Zelensky. I mean, that should tell you everything. You know, they are...

what they are. Okay. In Europe, as you say, the reaction has been, well, in the more sophisticated press, and I use that term loosely, but in the press that diplomats read, I'm thinking the Financial Times, they kind of admitted that Zelensky behaved like an ape, but they tried to kind of bury the lead. You know, it's in like paragraph five and it's like, Zelensky could have been more diplomatic. It was something like that in the editorial.

But in the rest of the press, you know, it's just Trump derangement syndrome, you know, spark it off. It doesn't really work anymore, but in this instant they had to gin it up. But that's not really a... That's not an organic phenomenon anymore. I mean...

Go back to the Keir Starmer meeting. The Keir Starmer meeting, to my mind, was pretty disastrous. Not as disastrous as the Zelensky one, but it was pretty bad. They made a fool out of the guy. They kind of ribbed him. They mocked him. They said, could you fight alone? You know, Trump sarcastically, like, with a big grin on his face, was saying how great the British military was and how Britain could defend us. Like, come on, guys. Like, if you don't get the joke on that one, like...

I don't know what to tell you, like get a sense of humor. But the British media covered that as a massive success. You probably saw it.

So at this point, we're in serious crisis territory. We'll talk about it later probably. We're in serious crisis territory for many of these European countries, diplomatically, politically, and it'll come militarily and economically down the line. And so, you know, do you blame the state for turning around and saying all hands on deck to all the journalists? That's what's happening behind the scenes. And by the way, like they should try. Like if you're the UK right now, your patriotic duty as a journalist is

is to get down on your hands and knees and scrub because like it's your only hope. So they scrubbed the Starmer one and tried to turn it, you know, tried to shine the poo, let's just say, until it looked like gold. With the Zelensky one, they were just trying to cover up the sting. But I don't think it's going to help

It's going to push the Europeans further and the Brits further into the delusions that they're currently in. It's a debt spiral. Like we're seeing a massive debt spiral at the moment. It's crazy. I mean, there is a strange divergence between appearance and reality happening. I mean, there was the series of tweets by European leaders backing Zelenskyy

And then, I mean, let's say you're Keir Starmer. You're watching that at the Downing Street pub, let us say. And what do you think? I mean, what do you come out of that with? Because this summit was sort of hastily brought together and then...

We have an announcement and we have Ursula von der Leyen coming out front of the cameras and talking about a steel porcupine. Ukraine must be made a steel porcupine to repel invaders. I mean, this is...

A strange metaphor, perhaps you can twist some meaning from it. Well, first of all, on Starmer in the pub, I think it's advised not to put alcohol into the Starmer robot. So just be very careful with that. It's in the fine print of the user's manual. But yeah, I mean, steel porcupines. I actually tracked the quote Boris Johnson said two weeks ago in a column. So Ursula von der Leyen said,

They went to Britain and they got Brit-brained. But whereas in the past that might have been a good thing, now it's a Boris Johnson Daily Mail column. So, you know, have the mighty of fallen apologies to the country. There are better writers than Boris Johnson guys. Try and pick them up.

But yeah, Steelcoil Porcupine. I mean, it's hilarious and it's meaningless and it's stupid, but that's what the conference was. It was hilarious, meaningless and stupid, right? I mean, even the kind of desks, did you see, were kind of like shabby IKEA desks or something. Like the whole thing looked amateurish. It was tempting to kind of see four-dimensional chess at play, like the clown conference was put there, you know, to visibly show that it was a clown conference to diminish European importance or something like that.

I mean, that would be the kind of like tinfoil hat reading, but it's too much. It's too much. I think it really is what it looked like. They were scrambling. They don't know what to make of any of this.

I mean, it's ridiculous because Trump has been messaging that he was going to do all this stuff since the campaign. And after the election, he didn't tone down his rhetoric. So the Europeans should have known what was going to happen, but they don't want to know. Look, like if you have everything invested in something, you just don't want to know that the alternative might happen because the alternative is too catastrophic. And that's what we're seeing in Europe at the moment.

Well, I mean, there are two alternatives. There is Europe keeps supplying money and arms to Ukraine, and there is Europe throws in the towel, and neither of those are feasible. No. Well, I mean, the Americans have said that Europe can continue to support Ukraine, but what does that even mean? Like, Britain sent 14 tanks to Ukraine. Like, the European support for Ukraine, beyond the monetary support, has been mostly fake, right? Yeah.

I mean, it's just nonsense. And the military support is like, I don't know, the British MOD planning those like escape from cold campaigns out in the Juniper River or something like it's a joke. Like, I'm sorry, we don't comment on the war because we're not a war show. But like, I've been watching it pretty closely. And the whole thing is a clown show. The Americans are behind this. And the main thing that they're providing is armaments, weapons.

mainly ammunition and so on. And the real thing, which is intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, ISR technology, this is satellite technology and so on. At the time of recording, about an hour ago, they shut down the ISR.

That's game over. And what I'm hearing now from some people on Twitter is, oh, don't worry, we've got like British ISR and French ISR and Polish ISR. That's the Polish space station that they're talking about there. So like, I mean, I joked on Twitter about that just before we came on. Like we all have access to Google Maps. Like, congratulations. Like there is no ISR. The only countries with ISR are the United States, Russia and China. They're the only ones with real ISR.

So the Ukrainians, as of right now, are fighting blind. They can't see where to aim their artillery unless they use a little drone or something. They don't know where the Russians are coming. Surprise attacks can happen. The whole thing that's turned this into a static frontline trench warfare situation has just changed.

So really interesting to see what happens next. Let's not speculate on it because literally by the time this podcast comes out tomorrow, everything will have changed in that regard and we could make a whole commentary on what happens when you don't have ISR. We might know within a day or two days. But, you know, without that assistance, there's no hope whatsoever. And there's a very strong possibility that unless the Ukrainians lay down their arms, the Russians can just steamroll them.

Let's just talk a bit about the technicalities of ISR. How does it work? Satellites. I mean, it's just satellites, really. And the satellites you've probably seen can track in real time, you know, pretty granular footage. I mean, it's just like a video camera overhead.

You can see some of this satellite technology online, right? But first of all, it takes a while to update, say, a Google map, right? It's usually a single photo because the satellite goes around the earth and takes a photograph every now and again. And the resolution's probably not bad at this stage on Google Maps, but it's not the best. That's why they send around the little cars that take photos of the front of people's houses.

But if you have proper ISR, you have real-time coverage. You have real-time live feed. I mean, think of it as a live feed of the battlefield.

So nothing can get ahead of you. There's no such thing as surprise attacks in the current Ukraine war. There's just no such thing. Because there's no way to... The moment you try and build up troops, the video feed will spot that you've built up troops, for example. And that's what makes the warfare so difficult. And then on the positive side, what ISR does is it provides targeting information. Real-time targeting information.

And that's for artillery fire, that's for drones, etc. etc. The only really way that you could operate without ISR that I understand is basically you could use reconnaissance drones. Now, something on that. The Americans are the ones with serious recon drones on the western side. They have the Reaper and so on. So you'll be using kind of primitive recon drones, first of all, my understanding.

And then second of all, like, really? So, like, I mean, just think of that. You have this massive front line that runs down hundreds of miles. You're not going to have a drone at every point capturing everything and then all these guys on their mobile phones to each other calling each other. That's not going to work, okay? What you need is a centralized business

a bunch of guys watching the front line with an ISR feed coming in and then feeding back to the guys on the ground through their mobiles or through their walkie-talkies where to aim their artillery and train fire. So, I mean, we don't know what happens when one side has ISR in a static trench warfare situation and you switch it off, but nothing good. I mean, I guess that would be what happened at the start of the war when the Americans said they had specific intelligence of Russian troop build-ups. They were just...

watching the ISR and they just, you know, watch it all play out in real time. Yeah. I mean, and then once you're, once you're in war, when there's a troop buildup, you're certain, right? That there's something's going to happen because if it's a decoy, you've just wasted a ton of resources doing a decoy. So if you're building up troops for it, that's why the Ukrainian offensive's never worked.

the Russians could see them in real time. Anytime they put together a band of brothers or whatever, they were like, okay, they're going to attack there and nothing works. The, so the only way to win the war is through attrition. There's no, there's no, there's no such thing as an offensive really in this war. Okay. So we talked a bit about how bad things are, but you were saying to me earlier that things may be even worse, that the sort of, that the quality of troops, the Ukrainians now have access to and what they're doing with them, uh,

means that this could be over in days in quite a horrific way. Maybe. I mean, again, we don't know what happens when you have the situation as it currently is and then you remove a key component, which is ISR. But the situation is much worse than people are being led to believe in the Western press. And the Western press line is basically...

things are bad and they're not great for the ukrainian army and they have a recruitment crisis and you know they don't have as much ammunition as they should have and the russians are gaining incremental ground all of that's true but then like times 10s it and that's that's the actual reality the interesting thing here is because i think many of our listeners probably follow like all sides on this and are getting a sense that the situation is much worse than the

The key here is that I think that there's an awful lot of evidence, especially from what Vance said to Zelensky in that meeting, that the dam has burst on internal intelligence in the US government. And it's due to the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence. What's been happening throughout this war, the rumors say, is that the intelligence apparatus with the DNI as the head who distributes the intelligence to the president is

has been telling the boss what they want to hear. So the line that you hear in the Western press is the line that Biden's team were effectively getting.

And it's not that people can say, oh, the intelligence agencies are manipulating and lying. No, it's because if you were DNI director and you started saying something that Biden and his team didn't want to hear, he'd fire you. So it's an incentive thing. Tulsi Gabbard's been put in charge of it. And they've said publicly, we want honest intelligence, honest intelligence, bad, good, you tell, you know, it's up to you. And so my guess is that there were a bunch of analysts in DIA,

Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, CIA, and so on, who've been writing critical reports since the war started, and they haven't been getting fed through the hopper.

They're now getting fed through the hopper. And probably at this stage, the people under the DNI, the people at the senior but not, the management but not senior level in these intelligence organizations have had two or three years experiences of seeing which analysts are getting it right and which analysts are getting it wrong. And noticing that the analysts that are getting it right are the more pessimistic ones. And they just haven't been allowed to feed that stuff up.

So that stuff's being fed up, and that's why I think J.D. Vance said to Zelensky that you're press-ganging people and sending them to the front, because there's extensive evidence, even in open source, that that is happening. But I don't think that J.D. Vance is following the OSINT accounts. I think that the nature of the intelligence being given to the White House has fundamentally changed in the past three weeks.

Will Zelensky get a seat at the table of any coming negotiations? No, and the Ukrainians weren't either. I mean, I think there's some hope in Britain that they can switch out Zelensky for Zeluzhny, who's been the ambassador in London now for some time. And I think the British have always seen him as a potential replacement for Zelensky when we're coming up to negotiations and so on, you know, to get a little bit more influence there. I don't think any of that's happening. It's pretty clear, look,

The broad point here, this is a gas, but we were talking about it before the show. It's a very logical gas. I wouldn't even call it a gas. I call it an inference.

The Americans are making a bunch of huge decisions about Ukraine. What can we say about that? Well, number one, they are not consulting the Europeans. Unless there's some bizarre pantomime going on right now with some nefarious influence behind it to trick us all, the Europeans are just frozen out. It is what it appears to be. They are frozen out. They're having their loser club conference in London.

So we can say for sure the Europeans are frozen out. We can also say for sure that the Ukrainians are frozen out because Zelensky goes over and loses the plot because he's frozen out. Okay, so we know everyone in Europe is frozen out, but the Americans are making decisions. So your default position, I think, of what a lot of people are thinking is, oh, they're making unilateral decisions. They're just like playing it the way they want to play it. And yeah, they are.

But wait a minute, two people are talking about this war in Saudi Arabia right now. Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio are meeting from time to time in Saudi Arabia. And two teams are working on this, the Russian team and the American team. And they're coming out with all sorts of stuff. Yesterday, they were talking about, the press was reporting that Russia is going to help the Americans with an Iran deal on nuclear weapons.

And then a few days before, or a week before, we talked about it on the show last week, I think, there was stuff being leaked to the press about the two countries working together on the Arctic Circle mineral rights and so on. I think recently as well, the Russians have been saying that they'll allow American companies market access to rare earth metals in the Donbass region. So all this stuff is coming out of those meetings. There are substantial discussions taking place between the Russians and the Americans in Saudi Arabia.

We'll follow that to its conclusion. These aren't unilateral decisions that America's taking. They are with respect to their allies. No, they're decisions being reached between the Russians and the Americans. Now that's too much of a nightmare for the Europeans to accept, but it's probably the reality. That ISR was turned off to Ukraine, I'm almost certain of it, because of a negotiation between the Russians and the Americans. And why would they do something so extreme?

Because the Trump administration have set priority number one on rebuilding trust in the Russia-U.S. relationship because they want to work together, great power style in the new world order. We've talked about this on the show already. I think it was our premium show, so like and subscribe.

Five dollars, euros or pounds a month, etc. No, seriously, do go back and listen to that episode. It was very good and pay us. But I'm almost certain that that's what's happening now. I don't think that these these are unilateral decisions in a sense, but they're decisions that Russia and America are discussing. And I'll just add one thing to that.

I've been watching the Russians for the past three weeks. So the way the Russians communicate is through a guy called Peskov. He's the press secretary of the Kremlin. Peskov, about three weeks ago, basic messaging was, we like what the Trump administration's doing. We're happy that they're shooting for peace. We're open to talks, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately, we're still focused on the special military operation.

And we just have to focus on that. And what Peskov is implicitly saying is, we like where this is going, but we've been burned before, and so we're just going to keep the head down. We think we can win. And if anything good comes of these negotiations, we'll take it. As of today, this week, Peskov has completely changed his tune. He's saying, we're stunned by what's happening with the Americans. We can't believe it. It's so positive. We can't wait to work together.

The way that you turn grim, morose, Russian Tolstoy Peskov into MAGA Peskov is you start doing stuff that the Russian side never thought you'd do.

You go into a negotiating room and the Russians go and you go, hey, how do we prove to you that we're serious about this whole thing? And the Russians kind of smirk and go, why don't you turn off the ISR? Like, you'll never do that. And then the Americans come back the next day and they go, we turned off the ISR. And the Russians are like, what? That's what's going on right now. That's what's going on in those meetings. I can guarantee it.

It's a strange bit of game theory because normally in a negotiation, you want to over-bluff at the start. I mean, that's kind of what Trump does in lots of other situations. But here, he seems to have taken the position that he's going to beat down the team that is normally on his side and diminish them. You might say charitably to force them to the table to recognise that they have lost because I think the first thing that needs to happen in any sort of negotiation situation is that there needs to be some vein where both sides feel that they have

a position to take to the table that they can get something out of it that's more than just continuing the war. But equally, his position has been to pump up Putin. And as you've just alluded to, to kind of give the Russians more than they were asking to. How does the game theory of that break down?

Because they have an intractable opponent. Like, look, Trump considers himself a negotiator, and I actually believe he's a good negotiator. I think he actually has spent most of his life thinking about negotiations, and I don't think he's stupid. And so if you spend that much time thinking about negotiations, and you're not stupid, you'll probably be pretty good at negotiations. I think he probably recognizes, I think he probably, he's by all accounts had conversations on the phone with Putin.

And he's come away with the same impression that I had of Peskov three weeks ago. These guys are tired of dealing with us and they're not convinced by us. They're relatively open. They don't want poisoned relations forever. They want to rebuild things. But ultimately, they think we always trick them and they think we always say we're going to do something and then we don't do something.

And then added to that, they're beginning to realize that they need to work with the Russians on various issues in order to make sure that the Russian-Chinese alliance doesn't completely just dominate the world. I think there's strong indications that they understand that.

that Russia is not going to be cleaved off China. That's a permanent thing now. But you can balance the relationship. You can start doing mineral work with the Russians in the Arctic, for example. There might end up being a new security arrangement for Europe that is somewhere between the Americans, the Russians, and the Europeans. The recent news this week is that there's talk of repairing the Nord Stream pipeline with U.S. –

co-investment in it. So that would mean US would get a minor seat at the table on the Nord Stream, which would be a big win for the Americans, actually. They're beginning to think in this kind of multipolar geostrategic way. Total real politic, no morals, Machiavellian to the core, kind of what we advocate actually on the show. And the only way to get from here to there is to convince the Russians that

That the game has changed. And the Russians are just never going to believe you that the game has changed if you're playing by the normal rules. So apparently, at least this is what it looks like to me, they're going in and as he's saying, they're overgiving. They're finding out what the Russians think that the Americans would never do in a million years. And then they're doing it. And it's working.

So the way it makes strategic sense is that Ukraine is just a sub game of a much bigger game, which is this kind of global reset. And it's playing out through projects, through kind of infrastructure, strategic co-investment, things like that, having like virtualization.

very industrial stakes and things. One thing that we haven't touched on yet, which came up in the White House summit, was, have you signed the minerals deal yet? Have you signed the deal yet? No, I'm just doing the paperwork. And then Zelensky kind of came out a couple of days later and was like, yeah, I've signed it, it's good. And within that time,

There is, I'm sure, a world. But tell us a bit about this minerals deal, because as I understand it, the idea is that America will have investments in mineral mines that are quite close to what is presently the frontier. And that was kind of guarantee in Americans. It is kind of a security guarantee to the region that these borders will not be interposed against.

Yeah, the mineral deal's fake. Oh, right. There are no... Look, the Russians didn't take the Donbass for the wealth, for the mineral wealth. It's to do with ethnic issues. There's not some Marxist... But the point is to bring commerce and capitalism, and it's the McDonald's theory of history, isn't it? I mean, that's what they're doing there. Wait, let me finish. So just to be clear on the motivations for...

the motivations for the war on the russian part are what they say they are they're to do with the security um seeing a buffer zone and they're to do with the ethnic russians in in the east of ukraine but the the reason it there's all history behind this and why the ethnic russians are in that part and everything like that but the sub division of this is that the vast majority of ukraine's wealth is in the donbass region from farmland to minerals and everything in between

And the natural resources in the east of the, or in the west of the country, sorry, I should have, maybe I said west there. I meant the east, the Donbass region, that's where most of the wealth is, the mineral wealth and the farmland.

The stuff in the West is very minimal. And that's been known for a long time. If you don't believe me, go and search articles from 2022, 2023, maybe even 2024. And there'll be Western people saying this and saying that Putin's doing a land grab, right? So it's been admitted on both sides. So Trump has put this minerals deal out because he's screwing with them. This is art of the deal stuff. This is like...

completely sigh up your opponent with some nonsensical deal, make them go back and talk with their advisors where they're all like, what does he want? Minerals? The minerals are on the Russian side. Why does he ask him for these minerals? And then you're completely confused and the press gets confused because they're focused on this minerals deal or something.

And it becomes this big political football. Meanwhile, you're inking real deals on the other side in Saudi Arabia. No one's talking about it. Look at the lack of reporting. Look, you can find newspaper stories on the Iran deal that they're cutting with the Russians. You can find newspaper stories on the Arctic deal, on the Gazprom deal. But they're on the fifth page. On page number one is this phony minerals deal.

This is our other deal. This is where Trump is very, very savvy because not only does he know how to manipulate his negotiating opponents, but he knows how to manipulate the media, which he's been doing for about 30 years. Okay, skip to the end. If there's a peace deal, what does it look like? Whatever America and Russia want it to look like. And since America basically is showing that it doesn't care about Ukraine, it's whatever Russia wants. That's it.

So this is a total L for the West, as it were. This is the dismemberment of Ukraine, a failed state in the heart of Europe. Why is that a good thing net for America? The question, the real question, is the failed state question. Because after Ukraine, after this happens, Ukraine is going to be a rump state, there's no doubt about that. Does it become a failed state? Can Ukraine govern itself is the question there. Because if it can't,

then there's only one option for governing Ukraine. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the Americans might go with it. What is that? Russia governs it with a puppet leader. It's been talked about privately for a very long time. What would happen to Ukraine in the event that it became completely unstable and couldn't govern itself? The Europeans can't govern it. They don't have the security resources to do so. America's not going to touch it. Use your, use your noodle and you come to one conclusion.

So, I'm not saying, look, the whole Ukraine war is a disaster for Europe. It's the biggest disaster Europe's faced since 1939, this war. It's a complete disaster. But in my opinion, it's been a disaster from day one because we're always going to get to where we are now. We're just getting there a lot quicker because the Trump administration has decided to completely change American geostrategy, which is something I never thought I'd see in such a short period of time. So, we're getting there an awful lot quicker.

but we were always going to get to this place. This is the bed that Europe made. And, you know, when the people are fighting each other on the front lines and people are dying in enormous numbers,

It's kept out of Europe and the propped up state with printed money in Kiev is there and everything looks quote unquote stable. But like, that was never going to last. Europe have created a gigantic problem for themselves on their eastern border. But they made this decision. I...

I didn't. Okay. I mean, amongst the sort of idiocracy in the Berlaymont, there is still a weird kind of hope. And part of that is just throwing more paper bills at the subject. I mean, it seems that Europe is going to be on the hook for the, what, 800 billion of rebuild costs. I mean, God knows how much it truly is. Does that fit in with your...

puppet state theory I mean how does the reconstruction happen and who actually pays for it there's no reconstruction coming it's all lies everything that's been said is lies about this war like I'm sorry to sound like a hippie from the 1971

But everything has been lies. There's no repayment. There's no reconstruction fund. There's no way to seize Russian assets. That doesn't even make sense. They're reserve assets in a central bank. Everything is lies about this war. Everything. It's the craziest war. It's... I don't even know what to say. It's why we don't... We...

I will give some backroom information here. We agreed at the beginning of the Multipolarity podcast not to talk too much about the war. No, we did. Because we didn't want to go down that route because it was such a mess. But obviously now that it's a completely salient geopolitical issue and you can't avoid it, we have to talk about it. But this is why. This is why we made that agreement. Because I think we all had a sense...

or at least Andrew and I did, that the war was fundamentally based on gigantic lies, much bigger than WMDs or anything that you heard about in Iraq. So there is no reconstruction fund. There is no money left in Europe. There is no military in Europe that can deal now. Europe has disarmed itself to a very large extent, sending off its tanks and equipment and so on to be blown up near trenches in the Donbass region.

Russia's not going to invade Europe because they have no interest in invading Europe. It would be a stupid thing to do. They just want a war. Why would you try and do something where you might get destabilization and rebels in the population? It's just a mess. So they're not going to do that. That's not on the cards. But there is no plan. There is no plan for the end of the war. The only conceivable plan...

that's been planned for in Brussels is for the Putin government to fall apart and for a Western-backed government to take over Russia and then start doing deals with Western European companies on extracting mineral wealth in Russia. That is the only plan that they have.

So, you know, this is truly the end of a lost war. Like, think of yourself in, it's not quite as bad, but think of yourself in the Axis powers in 1919. That's where Europe is. It's the Kaiserschlacht. One more push, boys. One more push.

There's only half a push left. Yeah. Okay. Well, speaking of Kaiser's, Friedrich Merz is incoming and he has just today announced that he's going to raise Germany's debt to GDP ratio threshold by 20% in order to fund Germany's

German rearmament, etc. We're hearing this in all of the chancellories of Europe right now. Does that actually happen? I mean, does that make a difference? Is that even meaningful? Psychically and spiritually, is that the world we're heading into, rearmament? Or is there a kind of a world where, you know, this new kind of American-Soviet axis takes hold and actually the security situation is relatively sorted and balanced?

the chancellories of Europe can go back to doing what they do best, which is producing anemic, low-growth, high-immigration economies. The latter outcome is what is going to happen, objectively. But the question about rearmament, to my mind, isn't really one about rearmament at all. It's whether the Europeans want to drive the final coffin nail into their economies.

We have a little thing in economics about inflation. Gavin Haynes, actually, I'll ask you here. Q&A. You're doing your Economics 101. What causes inflation? What's the great phrase about inflation? Money supply. Always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Is that the phrase? So there's too much money chasing... Too few goods. Okay.

Are there more or less goods in Europe right now after deindustrialization? Well, yeah. Okay. There's fewer. Yeah. And what does Kaiser Merz want to do? Well, he wants to make more goods. But how does he want to do that?

With more... I don't know, what is the question here? With more money, yeah. He wants to pump more borrowed money into the system. There's a massive supply-side constraint, yeah, because we've de-industrialized a bunch of which factories have shut down. Just this week an Audi factory shut down in Brussels. Volkswagen's been shutting down. But they can import the arms. I mean, it doesn't have to come from domestic production, that's the thing. It's like the Marshall Plan would never have worked if that were the case. I suppose they could import them from Russia. They could do, yeah.

There's no, they are, the plan is apparently for Europe to revitalize European defense industry because they want to, they want, they're embarrassed that they can't produce shells and so on, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, the real, the real issue here is that are the Europeans going to give the final push to the car that's teetering on the edge of the cliff?

And if they go and they start spending, blow out their budget deficits to 10% of GDP or some mental stuff, while they have supply constraints in the economy, stagnant growth, etc., etc., they're going to create inflation.

It's not going to be disastrous, catastrophic inflation, but it'll be heavy inflation. It'll be nasty, nasty inflation. And it'll be the kind of inflation that we saw during the war years all over again. It hurts. People's living standards will fall. They'll get rest of it, etc., etc.,

What will not come out of it is an army because these people, like Frederick Mertz apparently came from the finance sector. But I can't see that the guy knows anything about economics if he got in the shower with them, to be honest. Because they think in terms of money, these people, they're sort of simulacrum robots or something. They're PowerPoint people. And they think in terms of money flows and all this when they think about the economy, which is not very often.

The reality of rearmament is you need a couple of things. You need big lumps of steel. You need to turn the big lumps of steel into vehicles and so on. So you need a very heavy industrial sector. You also need people, actually, to go into your military, which is not a very popular profession these days. They haven't even thought about any of this stuff.

They're just coming out and virtue signaling. And people like Kaia Kallus are being put out in front. And it's like, this is an impressive person who has a plan to rearm. And you look at Kaia Kallus and you're like,

I don't think you could do long division. Like honestly, I would be surprised if Kaya Callas could do long division. They're not, these are really mediocre people who've been chosen by the previous American regime, let's just call it, and they've been promoted as vassals. And when you promote vassals, you want the vassals to be pretty dumb, right? So they've promoted all these really stupid people in Europe and they come up with cockamamie plans and wacko stuff.

But Germany's in a self-destructive debt spiral right now. It's giving up everything that it's held dear since 1945. It's giving up its fiscal prudence. It's turning itself back into this militaristic Kaiser power again. It's not going to end well for Germany. And as we said in the previous time when we talked about Merz and that, it's not going to end with the Fourth Reich. It's just going to end up with, like, communism.

Germany on steroids and like all these like angry people marching around thinking they're going to join a military. It's just pathetic. It's sad. Yeah. I have to say, I'm quite surprised at how Germany has just decided to put aside all of the lessons that it, that it learned, that it taught others over the past 70 years in a sort of a fit of madness. It's a very amnesiac moment. And yeah,

yeah i mean we often talk about uh kaya callas on the show you and andrew do uh and i i never actually heard her speak before this weekend and i came across some clip of her on a panel oh i'm really sorry yeah talking about like competition with tyna and it was just this sort of like idiot monologue i didn't know who it was i was just watching the clip and then i kind of clicked through i was like oh

Oh my God. Wow. That's, that's her. Right. I always thought you were kind of, you know, bloviating a bit, kind of giving it thick, but you weren't. So, uh, I want to be clear. Ursula von der Leyen can stand her, think she's an idiot, whatever, but I don't think she's a complete moron. Kyle Callas is a complete moron. Yeah. Like terrifyingly so. Scary moron. Yeah. Yeah. And like, and all she's doing is occupying a senior role,

Wandering around the place calling yourself an EU diplomat while just basically regurgitating the Baltic position on Russia. Like the Baltic position of Russia currently occupies the key diplomatic role in the European Union. And the Baltic position on Russia isn't being held by a smart person from the Baltics. It's by some bimbo. It's shocking. And on that point, there is this European elite that we often talk about in the show of which Kallis comprises part. Von der Leyen, etc.,

They are going to go down with this ship. They are going to wear this one. Are they? I mean, what happens to them and what happens to, I guess, the sort of the berlimont, the sort of European institutions in five years time? Do they revise their thinking or do they just keep on drowning? There's no one to revise it. It goes back to what I was saying. The Europeans over the past...

20 years, 15 years, I don't know when it started, vassalized themselves completely to the United States. A lot of these people were promoted through Atlantis' networks. I don't mean that in some conspiratorial way. It's just like you get your rubber stamp at the Atlantic Council. You get your scholarship on the Soros Foundation. That's how this works. I've been around it. You've probably seen a bit of it too. So that's how the system works. And they promoted all these complete mediocrities because...

Anyone who ever like had an original idea is scary to the system and since the system promotes fast luge so there Those people don't have the the IQ in a sense to turn the ship around They just don't have it like even if you even if you pointed a gun at their head and said you either come up with new ideas and you reform your Institutions or I shoot you in the head. They won't be able to do it. They'll just be like, I don't know how to do that. I'm sorry and

So it will not turn around. It will not turn around. And there's no counter-relief. There's clearly in D.C. right now a counter-relief taking over. It's very, very clear. These aren't just a bunch of people from the mob. They're people who've been thinking for about eight years about what they want to do and they're currently doing it.

There are no counter-elite that I know of in Europe, and so there probably are no counter-elite in Europe. So there's no one else to take over the reins. I think there will be a lot of political turmoil with elections and so on, but no, I don't think they'll be able to pull themselves out in time. It's going to be complete chaos in Europe over the next 10 years.

The elite networks themselves are finished. I mean, these people's careers are finished because the networks are being shut down. That's what USAID is all about. And, you know, places like the Atlantic Council, which I'm pretty sure is funded by USAID or at least by adjacent networks or whatever. But the point is, like, even if the Atlantic Council has some independent funding source from some billionaires, which they might, they're not really locked into power anymore in D.C. Like the Trump crowd don't have much time for those people.

And so they become de facto irrelevant, you know. So at most, the networks that sustain this blob are being shut down. At least they are being shrunk and they're being shrunk. So there's going to be a lot of unemployment in that sector, we might say as a macroeconomist.

So they're all finished. They're all completely finished. I did that interview with Bastani a week and a half or two weeks ago. And we were talking about, you know, what happened to the starry-eyed Soviet would-be coming-up elite in 1985. Like, you're a minor functionary in the party and you're like, you made all the connections and you're really mediocre. But you made all the right connections and you've gone to the apparatchiks' house for dinner. What happened to them in the 90s?

They became taxi drivers. Like they really did fade into oblivion, you know, around Central Europe and so on. We see some of them from time to time. And they faded into oblivion and that's what's going to happen to all those people. And, you know, most of them aren't smart enough to understand that, but they have an instinct. They have a little instinct in their mind, which they're like something bad has happened. There's a gorilla in the room.

I don't know what the gorilla is, but there's a gorilla in the room and he's banging around the place and I'm kind of scared. They can't really pinpoint it because the average person who gets promoted through these networks can't see the network. It's like asking a fish,

to understand that it swims around in water. It has no perspective, otherwise it can't stand outside the tank because fish don't have Cartesian thinking, as it were. So the network blob people don't have Cartesian thinking either, but they have instinct. They have that kind of animal-monkey instinct, and I think it's kind of kicking in, and they're realizing that the road might be running out. But I don't think they're truly going to understand what it means until they're...

until they're giving you the Uber ride to the airport. I mean, this has been quite a sad story so far. So it's good to have a moment of light to realize that these people are going to be, you know, jockeying for PowerPoint jobs at small scale graphic design consultancies in the next few years.

So one prediction that came out of John Mearsheimer's extensive work on the Ukraine war and the subject was that China would have a role in the peace deal. That doesn't seem to be the case so far. But if you were China and you were looking over at this squall, what would you be thinking? Well, the first thing is on the prediction. I think it was a classic case of being wrong for the right reasons. I probably would have said the same thing.

The reason China aren't getting in on the peace deal is because the Americans have just decided to completely strong arm this thing. Like if they'd let it, if Harris had got in, the same thing would have eventually happened, but it would have been spun out. It would have taken forever.

Things would have collapsed, things would have gone janky, and the Chinese eventually would have stepped in. That's pretty much what probably would have happened. And I pretty much assumed something similar was going to happen with the Trump administration, that there'd be loads of bureaucratic inertia, there'd be a lot more will to get it done, but etc., etc. So the Americans almost certainly have factored into their calculation, if we don't get this done, we're just giving China a new entry point into Europe, which is exactly what would have happened.

In terms of the Chinese, I think, I mean, obviously they would have preferred to have something to do with this. They could have potentially been involved in some sort of a reconstruction effort. They might have got some minerals, something like that out of Ukraine. If they'd got a seat at the table, it would have solidified their relationship with Russia even more, which would have been good for them.

But, you know, ultimately, I think the Chinese are just like, you know, we'll take the opportunities when we can get them. But if things go in the other direction, like, it's fine. They prefer the war not to be there. They're interested in the European market primarily, right? And they're seeing this as complete self-destruction mode for Europe. So the sooner that stuff gets ironed out and put to bed, I think the happier the Chinese are.

But, you know, the real smart strategic thinkers in China right now probably do see a little bit of a missed opportunity because the Americans have decided to actually take a decisive line for once and do something like clear and actually get it done. So but yeah, I don't think they're, you know, the Chinese just kind of like hang around and take W's when they can get one and avoid L's. That's their kind of strategy. Yeah.

Okay, so it seems like things are coming to a head. So, I mean, what are the life lessons for this? I mean, in many ways, this is a war, maybe 33 years in the making, maybe 18 years in the making, maybe sort of, you know, four years in the making, depending on who you're talking to or 10 years in the making even.

It seems to have shook a lot of stuff out. We're now approaching some kind of new event horizon, new plane in global thinking. When people look back, when they write the proverbial history books, what will they take from this? Who was Chamberlain? Who was the Kaiser within all of this? Well, the first lesson will be a lesson that's been learned a few times before: don't go to war with Russia.

How many times have Europeans won a war with Russia? None. What about 1860? What about the Crimean War? Debatable. Debatable. We'll have that debate. But you know what I mean. Anytime that you try and encroach on Russian soil, anytime the Europeans try and encroach on what the Russians see as...

Russian soil, please don't tell us, you know, send us emails saying, well, actually going back to, going back to little ruse and what's it called? Keevan ruse. Okay. Not getting into the Putin Tucker discussion, but, um, you know, when the Russians see something as their turf and the Europeans intrude on it, it rarely ends well for the Europeans. So generally kind of a bad idea. I think this will be another notch on that particular bedpost. Apart from that, uh,

Don't mess around with conflicts on your borders. You always want to avoid conflict on your borders no matter what. It's crazy to think that in the modern world, like maybe in the feudal times, conflict on your border could work in your favor because you get a couple more serfs to give you the tithe or whatever. But modern economies and stuff don't work like that. Conflict's bad. China's instinct is right. Conflict's bad.

Conflict bad for power. Okay, just bad and Those are the new realities of war. I think those have been the realities of war since the since the early 20th century I think we've been relearning this crazy lesson since World War one the war is just bad for your power No matter who you are, even if you win a European war, it's bad usually so

I think that is another lesson. In terms of how the history books are going to be written, this is where it gets kind of interesting. Because if the US are basically acceding to Russian terms, which is what they are doing, they can spin it if they want, although they're not even putting much effort into spinning it. They're just distracting with minerals deals and stuff. But if they're basically conceding to Russian terms...

That means that the Russian interpretation of the war is going to be the one carried in the history books. Now, Europe can write their own little history books for a couple of years, but it won't last. The winner of the war usually writes the history, and that's definitely going to be the case here. The Americans are not going to want to be written into that history too negatively.

And so the logical thing to do is to blame the war on the Europeans. And there's a lot of coat hooks to hang your coat on on that from the admission, false admission in my opinion, by Merkel that Minsk was fake. You remember that one? She's going to regret that one. She's completely destroyed her legacy with that. And she's lying, by the way, just for the record. But it'll be that sort of thing. There's a little trail of breadcrumbs that you can use to blame Europe for this war. The most prominent one being Boris Johnson

Boris made a big mistake with that one. But Boris Johnson going over to Kiev and tanking the initial peace deals. Now, he was being told by the Americans to do it. We know that. But it's not going to be written that way. So Europe's going to take the blame for this. And I think most prominently the two countries that are going to get it in the eye worst are going to be Britain and Germany. I don't know if you noticed, but when Macron went to D.C. just before Starmer,

He got the best reception by far. Trump and Vance didn't seem to be ribbing him too much. I mean, maybe they did a little bit, but they weren't making overt fun of him as they did with Starmer. And I think the reason for that is because at the start of the war, it's been widely reported, and I think it was even reported at the time, that Macron actually started making phone calls to the Russians, to the Ukrainians and so on, and tried to actually start a peace process going.

He failed and he was told to, you know, that's by other people not to do that. Fair enough. Probably the Americans mostly, but also probably the British, maybe the Germans. And he stopped and then he became a massive supporter of the war. And it kind of ended up destroying his territory, his presidency, in my opinion. And when the Russians intervened in Sahel, he went completely mad after that. That will be my assessment of Macron. But at the beginning, he didn't instigate it.

And so when the Americans all know that, they'll have their briefings on that. J.D. Vance and Trump will understand all that. And so when Macron comes over, he gets treated with kid gloves a little bit. I'll bet if if Kaiser Mertz goes over, he won't be treated in the same way. So I think we're getting all these little minor indications of where the blame is going to go. And I think it's mainly going to go Europe, number one, but subdivision Britain and Germany.

I mean, do you think this will finally cure Britain of its Churchill mythology and its sense of being the historical good guy and its desire to be America's lapdog? I mean, we could have done a whole show on what's happening in Britain. We haven't even touched on Peter Mandelson.

Cut it on a whole show on what's happening in Britain. It's somewhere between insane, tragic, I don't even know what to say. The country's in meltdown. The US diplomat is writing policy in TV interviews. I mean, we won't go into too much about it, but the diplomat's role is just supposed to go in front of a camera and say whatever the government says. Mandelson did the exact opposite. And as I pointed out to you before the show, no one's chastising him for it.

So there's complete chaos in Britain at the moment. And the relationship with the Americans is being buried in real time. And my sense, because I know Britain better than probably any other country, apart from probably any other country I'd say at this stage, maybe America, it's just panic, complete and utter panic. And I have to say...

I don't want to, you know, you'd have to spend 20 minutes trying to articulate what this means, but I don't think Britain in its current state is going to survive what's about to happen. It's very, very ominous. Germany's going crazy too. That's the other big loser here. And we talked about that. The Kaiser say the money printer is going burr and the factories are closed.

It's a different type of crazy, but Britain's melting down at a kind of diplomatic and political level right now. It might bleed over into the economy if, for example, the Americans get sick of the City of London having too much financial pull, and it could go in that direction if the British don't play it right. But back to your question, the problem is that the British can't see it. They just can't see it. It's just not...

The political problems in Britain are slightly different from the political problems elsewhere. The political problem among the boomers and the Gen Xers is pretty similar to the rest of Europe. And it's effectively, TLDR version, is that they are so tied into this relationship that they can't imagine it ending. And so it's just a complete blind spot. It's like going and telling them that, you know, they're...

a DNA test was done and all of their children are some other guys, you know, something completely unable to like, I raised them all. They're at college now, like, you know, shattering, absolutely shattering. And that's for the older classes. And then, but the key problem that's, that's probably a problem all over Europe, but the key problem with, um,

What the younger people is, and you probably know this as well as I do, the young people, young conservative, slightly dissident people in Britain are...

strongly encouraged not to think about foreign foreign policy issues in a far more profound way than the americans not even comparable the american young people think about it all the time but even the europeans um you know a younger french person i mean we meet these people sometimes a younger french person a younger german they have all sorts of ideas on foreign policy they talk about multipolarity how the world's changing and so on

But you go to the kind of dissident circles in Britain and they're just, they're focused completely on domestic issues. That's not a coincidence, by the way. That's not a coincidence. The system in Britain is far more punitive of thinking outside the box on foreign policy issues, which I've learned.

Well, you're the poster boy for punitive. But, I mean, Britain has this kind of historical destiny, this sense of itself. And does that go away now? Is that remade in some sense? On the premise that this is all really collapsing in real time at the moment.

if we accept that premise, and we also accept the premise of what I've just described, a very, very sclerotic political system with people at the top that are so invested in the current state of the world that even thinking about it changing would break their brains. And then a bunch of young people coming up who've spent all their lives being strongly encouraged not to think about these things and to just go along with it, who aren't as, by the way, I will say this to the...

more dissident people in Britain who aren't as enthusiastic about it by any stretch. It's not about that. It's just that they're told the implicit deal there, I can tell you from experience, is just don't talk about it and that's fine. But if you talk about it,

You might not get that writing job, you might not get, etc., etc. What you're describing there is a system with no slack built into it, right? And a system with any slack that hits a snag, hits a, you know, that's bad. So my, I mean, we'll see how it unfolds. It'll be very interesting to watch. But my...

My initial assessment will be very pessimistic, but I've thought for about a year now that the war would, maybe a year or two, that the war would end up collapsing Britain.

Wait, are we going to cut that bit? No, I'll say it directly. It's why I left Britain. Okay. So this is, I mean, this is a pay dirt for you. This is the alpha moment. This is ground zero of your, the ideology that you have played out in practice by moving 2000 miles.

Yeah, I mean literally. I could see this coming 18 to 24 months ago. I could just see that the things weren't going to shift. And you know, there's a lot of smart people in Britain who go along to get along and they keep their mouth shut and they know what's going on. And some of those people who I'd be friends with would, in a private moment, say, Dominic Cummings, for example, knows. He knows.

There are people like that, but the system is just very, very static. It's very late Soviet. And it's bad. It's bad. No, I don't say it with any glee. I wish I saw the country responding a bit better than it currently is. But their current maximal response is basically that they're going to act as a conduit go-between.

between the European students. I'm telling you, this is... And Peter Mandelson's going to broker it all. And it's complete fantasy. But, you know, knowing some people that are in these spheres and so on, I'm not remotely surprised that...

as I said, I, there's just no slack. There's no intellectual slack in this system. And when you drive a system that has so little slack in it into such a crisis position, it, it is almost inevitably going to collapse. I hope I'm wrong, but I really, really doubt I am. But,

But collapse is not necessarily like a kinetic event. It often just, you know, it's more swampy than that. It's less fluid. Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it is made out to be is a great line to take in investing and in life.

Yeah, it's the kind of like dumb people say that that means nothing ever happens. It doesn't. It's just that, you know, you don't get a Hollywood movie version of it. No, no, 100%. There's not going to be some. The big blow up events that we're going to see in what might be the collapse of Britain, in a sense, are the ones that we're literally watching. Peter Mandelson going on TV. These are the things that are going to be written about disagreeing with his government. These are the events.

you're not going to see like riots in the streets you're not going to see you know frogs coming down from the sky raining frogs we're not going to see any frogs I mean we might but I don't think we'll see any frogs um

No, it'll just be this kind of collapse into inertia, as it were. So the political elite will scramble for plans. We're already seeing that. They'll cope, as the kids say. They'll say, no, well, we'll get Mandelson to act as a broker to go between, and then the Americans cut off the ISR.

And now the British are in another crisis. Well, Mandelson's clearly not going to become a good one. And eventually it'll become clear, for example, that the Americans are negotiating this with the Russians. Well, the Russians are the mortal enemy of Britain. What do we do? These were our friends. These were so special relationship. Now they're working with the Russians of all people. And we hate the Russians. Blah, blah, blah. You keep going down, spiral down, spiral down, spiral down. And at a certain point, the whole system will become incredibly exhausted. Right.

It won't have ideas anymore. It won't have the networks anymore. It'll just have nowhere to go. And it'll kind of... What that looks like when you get to the terminal point...

I've been systematically working my way through Dominic Sandbrook's four or five volumes of British history from Suez onwards. I think he's up to the Falklands now. And it has a bit of that feel. It has a sense of pillar to post, you know.

British diplomats are always over-egging their own status and coming up with schemes, sewers, etc., devaluing the pound. Oh, the Americans will underwrite Trident, etc. And then something always gives way. And there is this kind of constant comic narrative of Britain over-egging its own sense of status.

And I wonder sometimes what Sandbrook, who writes with this very comic tone, undertow, would make of the present five-year period, perhaps. And just this sense that this country...

It has a comic tone, but the comedy is getting very, very dark now. It hasn't been that dark in the past. And, you know, sort of writing up the vignette of Mandelson going on TV and saying the opposite of what Starmer says and, you know, working on the diaries of, I don't know, Starmer's comms director and things like that. It just seems like we're moving into this world where the pathos is leading now.

I mean, Britain would have got there probably a little bit sooner had it not been for establishing the so-called special relationship with America anyway. And even that, as you say, turned out to be a little bit of a comedy of errors from Suez to Deval's and so on. But, you know, Britain between the Suez crisis and today had plenty of opportunities to change course and to recognize itself as what it is, an island of less than 70 million people. It's a large island. It's big enough.

reasonable global player good diplomatic political capital a little bit of um uh ex-empire hatred and some of the former colonies to overcome those were the realities that britain had to deal with and they didn't play their cards very well they they put all their eggs in the american basket i agree with you though i think it is um i think it is kind of coming to the point where it's uh

it's gallows humor time it's like the guy going to the going to the noose and he's making a joke about his dinner you know which by the way stiffer up a lip and all that i i it's better than breaking down crying but uh yeah it's i think the i i mean i can't see i can't i cannot see where britain goes next i mean let me put it this way

I didn't think America would be able to pivot geostrategically. I just thought there was too much inertia in the system. I thought that they'd muddle through and have decades of chaos and maybe eventually find their geostrategic place. That was my assumption. America has shown that it does have a capacity for self-reinvention, which is amazing, actually. I'm enormously impressed with what's

You can disagree about the Russia stuff, whatever. But the point is that they've just rejigged the system. They've pressed reset on the system. It's hard to do that, okay? Most people can't do that in their own lives, let alone a country. So that's really impressive and it has to be said. The problem is if you said to me, okay, well, we're going to get, you know, the American team to come in and take over the entire of Britain and Whitehall's not going to provoke any resistance and, you know,

Everything's fine, but we need a plan. At this point, I'd say I don't know what that plan is. And I can assure you nobody in Whitehall has that plan. And nobody in politics has that plan because they've been encouraged not to think about foreign policy for a very long time. So Britain is boxed in physically at the moment. And that's the problem. ♪

I love that one, like what do you want to do when you grow up? Like astronauts, train driver. Yeah, my tolerance is definitely, definitely, like there was a time when I was

I mean, I was never like a superstar. I was never like 10 pints. You know, I couldn't be a cop. Whereas these days, it's a watch, to be frank.