Trump Edition: Annexing Canada, negotiating with Russia and containing China
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So I think Canada is going to be a very serious contender to be our 51st state. America is not Canada.

And Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. At this point, I spent a lot of time with the president. And not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel. We're not going to be defeated. We're not going to be humiliated. We're only going to win, win, win. We're going to win, win, win.

I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines, Trump edition. It's Friday the 14th of March 2025. The American president has made clear he wants to make Canada America's 51st state. Telegraph foreign correspondent Memphis Barker has been meeting the Canadians who think that's not such a bad idea. And I speak to Tom Wright, a strategic and national security advisor in the Biden White House.

I asked him what he makes of Mr Trump's approach to handling Russia and China, and whether there are more points of continuity between the Biden administration and the Trump administration than at first seems.

But first, Donald Trump's remarks about making Canada America's 51st state were initially treated with amusement, then incredulity, and now increasingly with anger. The two countries are locked in a ferocious trade war, with Canada unveiling retaliatory tariffs against Donald Trump's own

The outgoing Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, accused Mr Trump of trying to crater the Canadian economy because it would make it easier to annex the place. Mark Carney, his successor, has said he will talk to Mr Trump, but only if there is respect for sovereignty.

The polls show that Canadians are rallying around their government. If anything, Donald Trump's rhetoric is pushing Canadians to rally to the flag. Polls show a surge in support for the incumbent Liberal Party. And 90% of Canadians say they would oppose American annexation under any circumstances. But not everyone shares that view. Memphis, welcome to Battlelines again. Where have you just been and who did you meet?

I was up in Alberta mainly and the interesting thing to say about the province of Alberta is that while Canadians on the whole

you know, reject this idea of 51st state. It really is, it's Western Canada where this 51st state idea, if not taking hold, it's sort of latching onto, energizing, invigorating a kind of long pre-existing separatist movement, separatist sentiment in these places. And a lot of it is connected to oil. Alberta is,

produces huge amounts of oil. You see the rigs as you're flying over the province, the Edmonton's ice hockey team are called the Edmonton Oilers. All the way across the province, 18 wheeler trucks are roaring this way and that way. Its identity is really wrapped up with the fact that they produce a huge amount of oil. I mean, America's oil imports...

Alberta exports more oil to the United States, 56% of all US oil. It's more than Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Iraq combined, just coming from this same Latin province. The thing that they're all really furious about, everyone I spoke to, is that as Alberta extracts this oil, as the people in the province do the work to get it out of the ground, a lot of the profits from that business are then equalized, which is essentially the

They're collected by the federal government and then they're sent to parts of Canada without the kind of same environmental riches such as, you know, Quebec or Ontario or Manitoba. And that really makes these oil workers feel exploited. And partly because they basically also feel at the same time looked down upon by kind of left wing federal government under the Trudeau, Justin Trudeau for example.

since 2015, but also Pierre Trudeau who began these equalization payments in the 80s. And they say, look, not only are they taking money from us, they are blocking any future exploration or more pipelines that would take our oil and our gas out of Alberta into other parts of Canada and potentially even over to the West.

And so it's a kind of long, bubbling, long-lying source of resentment towards the federal government. And sometimes they say, well, we hate these guys so much. Why not head south, join up with Trump, drill, baby, drill, bring it on. The first thing that strikes me from all that is that's a familiar story from many countries around the world of the oil or resource-rich province that either feels hard done by and neglected.

by the rest of the country. Sorry to be a broken record, but that was one of the narratives in Donbass before the first Russian intervention in 2014. We mine the coal, we feed the country. That's what they told themselves, what the Russians told them. And they felt that resentment. We can think about places like Brunei, right? Which basically went for independence because it had all the oil and so on. So that's one observation. I just wanted to give readers a sense of this.

and where this is because Canada is such a big place. So this is Alberta and Saskatchewan. If you look at the United States, they're straight north of Montana and North Dakota. So it's the prairies, it's the Great Plains. They're huge, absolutely enormous provinces. Could you sense what it looks like there? What's the landscape? What kind of a place is this? I mean, I've never seen anything quite like it when I was both driving and flying. When I was flying up from Calgary to Grand Prairie, which is...

very low-lying ice everywhere the biggest tallest thing in that city are the trucks which are absolutely massive and you see them pouring out down the highways but getting there you start to move across landscape that's sort of rock and snow basically and parts of it very very flat all you'll see is just rock and snow and maybe the odd valley honestly as far as the eye can see and as I

As I was flying up, I was just thinking, I'm not sure I've seen a house in six minutes of flying. This is really, really sparsely populated up here. And then over the other side, you'll see the mountains. So it's kind of over more and more towards British Columbia because Alberta and Saskatchewan, very flat, flat, flat, flat.

and then the odd oil rig. So you see some of the flames from burn-off as you're coming into land in Grand Prairie. And then, as I've kind of already mentioned, you've got trucks, but also the average car is a gigantic SUV sort of truck. They're all covered in dirt. The wheels are all really raised up high off the ground. These are civilian cars? These are civilian cars. These are not even for the industry because, you know, as I tried to walk from one side of the highway to the other, and if it was after the worst of the winter, I just sort of...

fell into effectively a snowdrift so it's not easy getting around. It's an extreme environment. Tell us a bit about these separatists you met. You met a man who swore the oath of allegiance to the stars and stripes in front of you I believe. Tell us about these guys. I was really interested in one of these guys a 78 year old man called Don Castleman. It wasn't kind of a mere provocation for him I felt as he swore the oath of allegiance. There were clearly

very deep-set feelings sort of driving him to take this move. And he was, before he actually swore the oath, he was talking about what he wanted for his children and why he felt that joining America would be essentially...

save them from the fate which he viewed as kind of sure to be coming to Canada. And it wasn't, again, it wasn't just sort of, I think we're being exploited in terms of our various, you know, oil projects and oil pipelines, although that was part of it. He himself was also really concerned with the defense of Canada, which is something that Donald Trump

often mentions, you know, he basically says, you guys, you have far too small of an army, military rather, given that, you know, Russia and China are now poking around your northern regions and up in the Arctic. You're going to find yourselves quite quickly on the back foot. And if Canada is unprotected in Trump's view, North America is.

unprotected too. So that's why he's wanting to kind of extend the American security umbrella more fully over Canada. But this was an interesting thing in Mr. Castleman's experience because he'd been building power plants up in the Arctic Circle in his youth and then a lot, you know, various other projects up there as well. You know, and he said to me, you know, there's just literally no one up there. I'd be pretty worried about

about how we can a can we even fund a larger military because we've not got a massive population about 40 million and you know the numbers we'd need we just there's no way for us to get them americans military is 1.3 million canada's is something like 763 000 and compare it to the british army say the british british army is around roughly the same size you know 72 000 63 000 but canada is 40 times the size and if you're looking to protect the north

You're going to need, you know, a significantly expanded military in Mr. Castleman's view. But what would other Canadians say to him is that, you know, Canada's in NATO. Why have we got to give up our sovereignty and join the United States for that protection? Why did he swear this oath, which I believe literally says kind of, I give up any allegiance to foreign princes or something. So he's literally just forsworn allegiance to the king and all of that. I suppose if you wanted to be strict about it, he's just kind of committed an act of treason to Canada. Yeah.

Why? Well, I mean, if that's a practical reason or a practical thought going through its head about their defence, I do think there is a more profound emotional drive to all of this. There are long-standing ties between Alberta and Montana, North America. People often feel like...

The American homesteader, the rural conservative voter, is sort of looked down upon in Canada. You know, a lot of the power bases over in the East, again, you've had 10 years of liberal Trudeau government, and they basically feel that, certainly the people I spoke to, felt that they were...

They were being sort of shunned and sneered at by the elites because the things that they advocate for more drilling or their views on crime and punishment, their general conservative principles, they felt were...

being kind of out of whack with the direction of the federal government, at least. And that sort of ate away at any kind of sense of Canadian patriotism and opened them up to... Also, they're very excited. Trump, for these guys, is a kind of exciting figure who promises...

who promises economic success. And so there's a great sort of appeal on the other side, as there is a kind of sense of pain and yoking on the Canadian side. I have a great quote from the owner of this bison ranch where these guys were meeting. He says, when people ask me where I'm from, I say, I'm Albertan. I don't say I'm a Canadian. And then they say, what's Alberta? And he goes, well, it's a colony of Quebec people.

and Ottawa, which is essentially his view that it comes back to their sense of political representation. They feel that again, because Canada's parliamentary system is a sort of mirror of the UK's rather than... It's first past the post-constituencies. So totally, right. So there is no protection, I heard again and again, for

which have comparatively few people in a very kind of rural and conservative, because a liberal government can get in quite, you know, happily with support just from Quebec on the west and, you know, Ontario, Ottawa on the east, you know, where the vast majorities of these population lies. So these people in the middle who live in this sparsely populated country

Well, Alberta has a total of 5 million people. It's not tiny in Saskatchewan around one. But broadly, they often say the election ends before it gets to them because by the time you know the result in Manitoba, you basically know the result...

overall and so they feel their voter... So they look over at America and they see how say the electoral college for example is deliberately set up to slightly counterweight that and give rural states more clout. They love that and they feel the lack of such protections for them is a real ongoing sore. And these guys are obviously people swearing an oath of allegiance to a foreign country that's going to be a fringe...

even if it is a quite deep, profound kind of sentiment of unfairness within Alberta. But you have historians who will say these are genuine issues. This is quite a serious separatist pull within certainly these two provinces. How long has it been going on? Well, at least since Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, who...

sets up equalization payments in the 80s, early 1980s. That's when the profits start going from Alberta out to other parts of Canada. And that was when you got the first surging movement for splintering. And you actually had a secessionist MP elected to the national parliament, a guy called Gordon Kessler. You know, then there was a lot of infighting in the movement, whether we actually want to go out on our own or do we want to get negotiations, as ever with these sort of

you know, more extremist parts of the political world, it actually fell apart with that infighting and they never quite got further than having this guy in parliament. I actually spoke to him on the phone and he was a rodeo, I've actually forgotten what you call a rodeo. A rider? Well, he was wrestling bulls inside the ring so he was, you know, he was someone who, you know, you hope would be able to handle a negotiation because I've seen pictures of him with

his hands strapped around the steers horns as he's kind of pulling it down to the centre of the rodeo ring he's now 79 he said to me listen I

I'm looking at it now. This serious guy, ex-MP, said, I think that joining the USA is the best thing for Alberta. And a lot of the reasoning is sort of lower taxes, First Amendment, Second Amendment, more protection under kind of the government system, as we've described, and potentially becoming also part of the great American project. I was wondering whether this... You know, Trump's talking about taking all of Canada. Is it possible you would see a drive by Alberta or one or two provinces to secede? Certainly, Trump has...

I mean, I was got first interested in this because in one of his press conferences, he is talking about the 51st state project and a Canadian reporter goes, you know, but actually wouldn't. It's not the whole of Canada, really. It would be Alberta, then Saskatchewan and probably British Columbia. And then maybe, you know, one province after that. And you've got yourself an enclave or, you know, a section of Canada. And Trump listens to him and he goes, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. He acknowledges that this is a possible route. Whether he thinks he's thinking about it in such nuanced terms is unclear, but it's certainly the more plausible version of this slightly implausible scheme. How seriously do you think the government in Ottawa is taking this?

I think at first thought the same thing. This was just, you know, even Mr. Trudeau was thinking like, he's just having a go at me, you know, fair enough. But then from January the 7th, when it's first mentioned next couple of weeks, you start seeing,

pretty surprising things happening and getting reported, such as Mr. Trump's negotiators are pushing to expel Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. Mr. Trump's negotiators are pushing for the borders of Canada to be withdrawn, redrawn, you know, pushed further north. And then you have a phone call between...

just to Trudeau and Donald Trump on February 3rd, you know, according to the New York Times, where he gets on the phone and he says much the same thing. He wants the borders redrawn. He wants the sharing of agreements around various lakes and rivers also to be reconsidered. And he's not playing around. This is sort of

a genuine request with an international leader and at one point Trudeau is caught on hot mic basically saying yes I think this is serious now. Did you talk to these guys about how far they would go in pursuit of this? I mean is it if it came to a fight would they take up arms? The Albertan group I don't think it's getting that far most of the people that I'm speaking to

Most of them are really just courteous, sort of enjoyable. Frankly, a lot of them, some of them at least, are late 50s, late 60s, late 70s. You know, part of the oath of allegiance is I promise I will take up arms if I'm called upon to do so by the United States. Those days are long past for some of those people who were taking the oath. But that said...

The younger members of the movement that I met, there is real anger there. It's not just kind of political cosplaying. And a lot of people I spoke to, they would cast this issue further down the line and they would say, if Mark Carney, who's replacing Trudeau as prime minister and may well win election...

due to help by the end of the year, continues with the same kind of policies, you're likely to see this secessionist movement. Didn't strike me as that they were particularly violent people, but it certainly gets more concerning and more dangerous the larger it gets. Memphis Barker, thank you very much for joining us on Battleline. After the break, I speak to Tom Wright, who spent three years running strategic planning for the Biden White House. What does he make of Donald Trump's approach to foreign affairs?

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Welcome back. It's been a dramatic week in world affairs. At talks in Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and the United States patched things up after the Oval Office row between Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, even announced that he persuaded Ukraine to commit to an immediate 30-day ceasefire. And the ball, he said, is now in Russia's court.

Thank you very much.

And also grappled with America's other great strategic challenge, the rise of China and security in the Pacific. Tom, welcome to Battle Lines. Let's just start with the news of the week, which is that after this meeting in Jeddah, Marco Rubio, Andrzej Jermak, the Ukrainian chief of staff, have now announced, OK, we've got a deal. Ukraine is prepared to sign up for a 30-day ceasefire, provided the Russians are also up for it. It's...

quite a significant moment, I would say, in the course of the war. What is your take on that? And is this actually your successors doing quite a good job in diplomacy?

Well, I think if you start by assessing where we are and what the main problem to be solved is, and we thought last year that negotiations would happen this year, regardless of whether it was Harris or Biden or Trump. The primary obstacle, as I saw it, was that Putin's aims remain very maximalist. He doesn't just want to keep the territory. He does want to do that. But he also wants a neutered Ukraine, not just a neutral Ukraine. He wants to

to impose real limits on its ability to defend itself really dominate the Ukrainian politics have somebody else replace Zelensky who will be a little bit more pro-Russian and that's something that Ukraine and frankly we could not accept because he won't accept a sovereign and independent Ukraine so if you set aside NATO set aside anything else

That's sort of the core issue. Now, that begs the question, why wouldn't Ukraine then go for an unconditional ceasefire? And I think the reason for that was that Zelensky believed that he wanted a just and lasting peace that wouldn't fall apart after a year or two or maybe six months. He believed to get that, he needed security guarantees from the West.

And he wanted to extract those guarantees before he really seriously engaged in talks. And that was a legitimate perspective. And I totally understand where he was coming from on that. But the situation has changed now in that they're not going to get security guarantees from the United States. They're not going to be in NATO. They won't have that guarantee from the US. And it'll be hard to see how the European piece of it would work.

So I was of the view about 10 days ago that they should call for an unconditional ceasefire. I think what they accomplished yesterday, and I think part of it is credit to the UK government as well for brokering this. But I think what they did was just say, let's just stop the war for 30 days on a mutual basis and see where we're at. No conditions, nothing else changes. And I think that very much puts the onus on the Russians today.

And it may have helped flip the script with the Trump administration because they were trending very hard into a position where they were basically backing the Russians over Ukraine. And I thought what Wilson Rubio said yesterday was encouraging to endorse the deal, obviously, but then say now the ball is in Russia's court. So I thought it was interesting.

adept by the Ukrainians, given the situation that they're in. But I do think, you asked me, do I think the Trump team are doing a good job? I mean, I would just say, it's really important to recognize that we have one major vector of pressure in Russia that is likely to press them into negotiating seriously. And that is the fact that on the battlefield,

they are taking over 1500 casualties a day on a sustained basis throughout most of last year in exchange for gaining small slivers of territory. And that puts Putin in a hard position. And so Ukraine has to keep up the pressure. To do that, they need our support to keep up the pressure, both weapons, but also primarily in this instance, military cooperation. And by taking the foot off the pedal on that,

I think the Trump administration really reduced the incentive for Russia to negotiate and reduce their own leverage. So if you were still in the White House advising Donald Trump, you'd be saying that this is your principal stick, carrot, whatever you want to call it, over Moscow. Yeah, because their view is that their main problem is Ukraine and that the Russians are playing ball. And that's basically backwards. I think the Russians have done a good job about manipulating the situation so it looks like that.

And there's no question that the Ukrainians sometimes can be difficult to deal with just because they can come across as demanding quite a lot. We had that too. I mean, President Biden, Zelensky, early on in the war, they had their moments of frustration mutually and President Biden felt that

Zelensky sometimes wasn't sufficiently grateful and was demanding a lot just after getting a huge package. They might come in and say we need much more and be putting a lot of pressure on. But I think we always remember two things, right? One, it's in our national interest to help Ukraine, regardless of any sort of differences with Kyiv. And the Ukrainians are under a lot of pressure. They're being attacked every single day. And so I think we have to cut them some slack.

President Trump and his administration lost sight of that early on. And then when they felt Zelensky was pressing them on guarantees, reacted in a way that really was an act of self-harm to U.S. interests by pulling support and making it more likely that Russia would gain territory in Kursk. You were dealing with this for three years. So let me ask you this. If you were still in your old job and you were advising President Trump,

His administration now, as you said, have put the ball in Vladimir Putin's court. They've now got to talk to the Russians. What would be your advice to them about how to talk to the Russians about this? I'd say three things. First, they should be on their guard for Russia to try to broaden out the

negotiations and try to coax the Trump administration into withdrawing U.S. forces from Europe, right? I mean, Putin, I think they will try to accomplish that in these negotiations. And that's a trap. And I think it would be very bad for, again, for U.S. interests, as well as for Europe more generally. I think the other thing to be wary of

is there is no, if anybody believes that they can peel Vladimir Putin away from Xi Jinping,

like they are sorely, sorely mistaken that will not happen. We saw a real deepening of integration between China and Russia over the last few years after the war, and it's been going on well before that too. Actually, if they pursue it, they may make it easier for China to peel parts of Europe away from the United States rather than the reverse. On the specifics of my advice, I think one thing

that I would say, which I know they're reluctant to do, is if they want this war to end quickly, they have to convince the Russians they're willing to go on for a long time. And if they say it has to end quickly and we're out if it doesn't end quickly, that gives all the leverage to Russia. We believe this, that if we wanted to end the war on just terms soon, we would need to have a credible plan

to support Ukraine indefinitely as long as Russia was attacking it, because that would be necessary as leverage to convince Russia that it couldn't just wait us out and that they had real sustainability problems on their side, on manpower, on financing, especially after the energy sanctions. And I think the administration is very much constructing this as we have deadlines, we need to meet those deadlines, this has to end. If it doesn't end, we're out, we're just going to stop.

And that, I think, will be counterproductive. And the final thing I would say is, I think in the negotiations, I think it's important to raise with the Russians some of the dilemmas that they face. I mean, they have created a hostile country on their border because they invaded it and killed lots of Ukrainians. And that is something they will be living with for some time and will

That's why I think actually that Ukraine and NATO, there is a pathway there with the Russians, because you could argue that a Ukraine that's embedded in the West and a bit more restrained because it's part of our defense plans and we are backing it up is likely to be more stable, a more stable equilibrium from even from the Russian perspective.

than a Ukraine that's more like Israel where we arm them heavily but they're fighting on their own. But I think those are the type of dilemmas you can

with the Russians over a period of time in the negotiations. And to be very clear that we will, as a default, at a bare minimum, arm Ukraine to the hill to make sure they can defend themselves to deter a future attack. And that we're going to do that sort of regardless. And we can, if they don't compromise on the guarantees. One thing that strikes me is that you're presenting a paradox, which is that if you want to end the war quickly, you've got to

plan to go on forever? Let's say for the term, so it's not people get wrapped up in these forever war discussions about you're saying you're going to go on forever. And it's like Afghanistan, I think it's not, it's not that because it's not by choice, like it's not elective in that sense. It's saying there's a bare minimum threshold of a deal that's favourable, even one that allows a

for the fact that Russia is not going to leave the territory, right? But ultimately, Ukraine needs to be a sovereign and independent country. And that's on the land that it controls. You'll be aware that one of the criticisms leveled at your old boss, Jake Sullivan,

Do you accept any of that? Do you recognize any of that?

No, I think it's pretty unfair, to be honest. I started just after the war started. You know, I thought there were some escalation concerns at the beginning because everyone's feeling around in the dark for something new and no one quite knew on the Russian side or on our side, which is what the state of play was. But by and large, after those first few sort of months, I think we were basically helping them as much as we possibly could with one, maybe one sort of exception, which is deep strike.

into Russia. But the things that we assessed they needed most from the beginning were artillery and air defense in particular, both of which were quite difficult to get. So 155 rounds where they were using about 6,000 rounds, 7,000 rounds a day, and we were producing 14,000 rounds a month.

right so we were producing a month what they would use in about two and a half days and it was incredibly difficult because of a lack of nitrocellulose and the explosive materials that go into 155 rounds to increase it so we tried really hard

we were told it could be increased from 14 000 to 14 400 that was totally unacceptable and we so we try to ramp it up more and looked around the world to try to find it from others so that's just one sort of data point i think but there are others too where what i saw was people taking real political risks to try to get everything to ukraine as quickly as possible i think we lost a narrative

But I would say if you look on the nuclear question, there was one period of five months where we were really worried about that, basically from June till the end of October 22. And all I can say is there was a real risk that they would use nuclear weapons. You mentioned paradox before. We were struck early on by the ultimate paradox, which is that they were likely to use them if Ukrainian forces were

We were on the verge of, from their perspective, a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine. And so the problem we had was that the circumstances under which they would use nuclear weapons were the circumstances we were working every day to create. So we were trying to create a situation where they would be defeated, which was the scenario where they were likely to use them.

And confronted with that, we decided very early on that we wouldn't pull back in any way on supporting Ukraine, but we would really lean into deterrence. And so we, along with the UK government and others, really communicated initially privately and then publicly to the Russians that there would be, I think what Jake said on a Sunday morning show in September, was catastrophic consequences for

if they went this route. And there was one weekend where I think it got particularly hairy at the end of October. And that was a nuclear escalation concern. It wasn't made up. It was real. I think subsequently that wasn't as large a concern because it wasn't reflected in what we were

seeing. But if you're in that position, you have to take that seriously. But I actually think we handled it not by pulling back, but by leaning into the deterrent message. Let's turn to the other big question, and that is China and the Pacific. I don't think the current administration has actually said that much about China beyond kind of tariffs and things since coming to power. So we're still waiting to see what they're going to do. Could you explain to us or to listeners what

how you see the nature of this challenge, this brewing confrontation between the United States and China in the Pacific, how you guys try to deal with it and where you predict it might go in future. This is an inherently competitive relationship. And I think that won't change for the foreseeable future. It's a strategic competition with a wrinkle, which is that we're in a very interdependent world where we're very interconnected.

They rely on us for all sorts of things. We rely on them for certain things, including many critical minerals that they tend to control. And I think when President Biden took office, I think there was recognition of that. And there was recognition that we needed to really improve our competitive advantage vis-a-vis them above all else, including above good diplomatic ties with Beijing. So what does that mean? I think that meant that

Three things, really. One was investing at home in key parts of national power where we would not be as dependent on China. So that was the CHIPS Act, particularly in high-end frontier foundational technologies, to make sure that we had and allies had our own capacity on those areas.

The second was to lean in to really deepening alliances and partnerships, not just in a better meetings, better atmospherics, but actually in improving material capabilities. That's AUKUS. That's the deal with the Philippines and new access to different sites there for the U.S. military. It's the trilateral of Korea and Japan and the United States. It's all of those things, upgrading of ties to Vietnam,

a new relationship with India. And the third bit then, which is targeted controls on certain types of exports and investments in China pertaining to the most sensitive technologies that we have, particularly on sort of the chips and the AI chips. So those are the tech controls that were put in place. I think what we saw was that the relationship

because it is inherently competitive, began to evolve in a pretty

volatile direction. So we had the Pelosi visit, which we were not a fan of. This is her visit to Taiwan. Visit to Taiwan. We then had the balloon incident, which is one of the more surreal. Just remind us exactly of the balloon incident. A Chinese balloon was basically spotted over the northwestern United States in Montana and then proceeded to a spy balloon that they could maneuver.

and used to photograph sensitive sites and became public and then was shut down on a Saturday afternoon. And then we had the support China was giving to Russia for the war in Ukraine. So those three things, I think, all happened in about a six-month sort of period. And I mention that just because at that point, there was a decision to really make sure we had an intense diplomatic track, a

alongside the competitive actions. And so there were channels, particularly from my perspective,

Jake Sullivan's channel with Wang Yi, with the Chinese foreign minister, that I think where they would often meet for 14 hours over two days. And it wasn't about trying to convert each other to say we should cooperate. It was each trying to explain what it is that they thought they were doing. And I think that helped to manage some tensions. And so it's a long answer, but what I'd say is you basically had at the end these two pillars, right? You had competitive actions and

the allies, the investments and the tech controls that all continued unabated. And then you also had this intense diplomatic track to try to manage those tensions and keep channels open. And I think that basically, from my perspective, sort of worked because it did help to bring in a level of stability. It sounds like you feel like that was successful in a way, and this alliance building in the Pacific leaves you

the Trump administration in a relatively strong position via V-China. Do you think they're in a stronger position than you guys were when you first came in? I know I'm biased, but I think across the board, they're in a strong position. I think the American people voted for a different direction, but they have a strong hand to play. We've had real advances in U.S. manufacturing and technology, in the U.S. industrial base and tech industry.

the alliances are very strong, both in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific. And I would say even in the Middle East, if you look at US adversaries and competitors,

they're all generally in trouble. Like Iran is weaker at any point, really, since 1979. Russia has failed to conquer Ukraine and is basically stuck taking these massive casualties every single day. And China, at the beginning of the administration, people thought that China was going to win the tech race, including in AI. And now it's widely acknowledged the US has a distinct

What did you get wrong? I mean, is there anything that stands out where you think, okay, actually, we should have handled X or Y different? Is there anything that stands out for you where there are regrets?

I think it's a hard question to answer. I think it's partly with the benefit of hindsight versus what we knew at the time, right? And with the benefit of hindsight, there were lots of things on Russia-Ukraine that I would look at again, including on just the counteroffensive and the way that was done in 2023, I think.

We put a lot of effort into training. We pressed the Ukrainians to limit the focus more. I do wonder if there was more we could have done to get them to build enough trust with them where they would have focused their efforts and line of attack in the counteroffensive more than they did. I think given that the lines haven't moved, you know, Milley said at the time, maybe that was the time to negotiate. I think that would have been pretty difficult to do. But I think...

Knowing that the lines didn't really move, I think, makes that a legitimate question. I think on Iran, obviously, we did not resuscitate the JCPOA at the beginning. I think we are in a strong position with the Iranians now on negotiations with

But I do wonder a little bit on the negotiating track back then if that would have borne any fruit. Thank you. Are there any points of continuity? Yeah, I think there should be continuity on the tech controls. There should be continuity on artificial intelligence. It's hard to know what they will do, but I don't think there's bipartisan opposition really on China policy. I think where we ended up, there's broad sort of support for that. So there could be some continuity there too.

Thank you so much indeed, Tom. That's it for this week. I'll be back on Monday with more updates on the unravelling of the world order. Enjoy the weekend if you can. Until then, that was Battlelands. Goodbye.

Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter, or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest.

You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. Battlelines is produced by Jolene Goffin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells.

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