178: The Silk Roads: A Decade On - Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford, on the Changing World Order
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Welcome to the Money Maze podcast. If this is your first time joining us, I'm the host, Simon Brewer. And in this show, we talk to proven leaders and thinkers from the worlds of business, investing and beyond. To stay up to date with every episode, please do sign up to our newsletter via moneymazepodcast.com.

episodes are also published on our YouTube channel and we're active on all major social media platforms. Thank you for listening. So if you're watching on YouTube or listening to this podcast, it's a little bit different in that we recorded Peter Frankopan, the author of The Silk Roads, a few weeks back and he's been reflecting on The Silk Roads 10 years on. And then in the interim period, we had the dual attack on

on Iran. And so we asked Peter to come back and just to give us a top up. And if you stay with the episode, which we hope you will, there's a short update of Peter's thinking as we all try and process the implications of this and whether there are conclusions being reached that in several months may turn out to be hopelessly optimistic or unrealistically pessimistic. So hope you enjoy the great Peter Frankopan.

As we move into an era where the political, military and economic dominance of the West is coming under pressure, the sense of uncertainty is unsettling. And while we ponder where the next threat may come from, the network and connections are quietly being knitted together across the spine of Asia. Or rather, they are being restored. The Silk Roads are rising again.

Those are the closing lines of the majestic opus that is The Silk Roads. The author, Peter Franker, founder of Oxford University, created a profound and enduring book that has been devoured around the world and with it has made its own mark in history. It's been translated into more than 45 languages.

sold almost 3 million copies worldwide, been a New York Times bestseller, described as breathtaking and addictively readable, and read by leaders East and West, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

It's also available on audio and an inspiration for exhibitions at the British Museum. So, Peter Frankopan, a pleasure to welcome you back in person to the Money Maze podcast. I was here four years ago, I think, but those are the days of COVID. So we were all kept far apart, but I'm in your fantastic new studio. So thank you for having me.

It's great. You indeed appeared in December 2021. You've just joined our advisory board, which we're very excited about. And as a recap, you're a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, the director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. And your focus historically has been on the Byzantine Empire, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Caucasus, Russia, as well as the interdependence of Islam and Christianity. All very topical and explains why you're very much in demand.

And our friend and co-founder, Will Campion, tells me that you are not only a great cricketer, but you're also a very handy Fives player. It's a little bit niche, I think. Even for those with the great variances of interest in the money maze, maybe do separate podcasts, maybe a live broadcast of the Fives Court game.

running around hitting balls with irons. Well, a few things stayed with me because I came and listened to you at the Cliveden Literary Festival several years ago, and you made this comment that 75% of the world's population live east of Istanbul, and we in the West have a propensity to live with our eyes stitched closed. And I'd like to start with this question, which is when you began this book, what was the inspiration and what was the expectation?

I didn't have any expectations. I was about to turn 40 and had the position at this wonderful university at Oxford and quite a wide range of interests. I mean, geographically, I'm broadly speaking, anything east of the Vistula, anything east of Istanbul has been things that I've been interested in, partly because of

That's where global populations are based, partly because of networks and connections and exchange of religions and so on. All the world's great religions, by and large, are from Asia. You know, we think of Christianity as being quintessentially European, but I can promise you Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth are not in Europe. And I think the process of trying to think about how to join up big history in a way that was both readable, engaging, but also emphasised what happens when you...

connect to each other. You know, we live in a network age, we talk about that word sort of easily, and we think that digital networks are changing everything. But infrastructure, connections, hard resources, new technologies, ideas from the past are key. So that figure of 75%, you know, you could keep escalating. So it's about 75% of the world's hydrocarbons sit in that region, about 85% of the world's rice productions

both in availability and in processing. And rare earths are not all rare, and so on, that's a whole other story. But you see the concentrations of what we should probably be looking at. And some of it, like you said in your very generous introduction that made me heat up a little bit with pride and embarrassment, is that Asia is...

home to more than all the other continents combined. And that means that things like climate change, things like consumption, things like energy, things like water, that's probably where we should be looking to for opportunities and challenges.

So when I wrote the book, it was how to join up lots of bits and pieces together, how to take a long view that covers a couple of thousand years and to do it with enough detail that my academic colleagues would be happy with. And my expectations were more or less zero because I'd been to enough drinks parties with, well, not with you and with Will because you're much too interesting and engaging and much too polite. But when I'd say I worked on Central Asia or I worked on Chinese views of the West or worked on what Iran meant in history,

People thought I didn't think I was mad, but they thought it was a strange way to spend my life. It turns out that those kind of fault lines, crossroads, networks, you know, India, Pakistan, China, Southeast Asia, those have always been incredibly important. And it's very clear to me that that's where our current, you know, mainstream challenges and opportunities, whether you're an investor listening to this, geopolitics, security, national security or otherwise, but also all these escalating challenges

ways we should think about the world. But I didn't expect anyone would read it. And in fact, when I got my dummy book cover back from my American publisher, which had a picture of a dump truck and a picture of a Persian relief

And I didn't quite, I'm not emotional, not very emotional, but I did have a gut lump in my throat thinking, well, that means no one's going to read it. But Emma Eubank is my cover designer here in the UK. I sent her a few ideas or a few images that I thought were great. And the images on the cover of the book is from the Great Mosque in Isfahan. And it captures exactly the kind of the richness, the colour, the wealth, the vibrancy.

So that when you start conversations, for example, in the introduction, I say, you know, 500 years ago or 1,000 years ago, the great universities weren't at Caltech or MIT or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, but they were places that are very obscure and exotic. So places like Isfahan or Merv or Bukhara, Samarkand, places that people might have heard of don't quite believe, you know, that this is where these are the engines of global intellectual thought power and trade and commerce.

So before we continue this conversation, we're going to take a short break to have a note from our sponsors.

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So you have the benefit of the historian's lens and I think that many of us fall prey to the daily noise and feel that change is greater than we've ever experienced. Then a higher level question, is that because of our age or is it because of the age in which we live?

Look, I think we all think we're living in a world of extraordinary turbulence, but I wouldn't swap 2025, however dangerous it might seem, with 1939 or with 1914 or 1917. Pick a date in the past. I think...

It is hard because we're bombarded with news sources. We're very personality driven. So people know the name of the leader of China, but they can't tell you the name of any other Politburo member. Same in Russia. Probably Lavrov has a high enough profile. But beyond that, Russian prime minister, minister of economics, let alone pick a state, pick a country, including really important ones. I think some of it is that the new cycle is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, you know, in the world of finance, you know, you have the U.S., you have Europe, you have China,

And then you've got emerging markets, which means everybody else. And that's probably 85% of the world's population. And probably it's time to break away from some of those kinds of designations where things like the rate of change in Latin America, and particularly its trade with places like China, have been on a scale that has been absolutely biblical

in the growth, you know, or just China on its own. So in 2000, when China joined, 2001, China joined the WTO, its economy was about a trillion dollars. Now it's 16, 17, touching 18 trillion. And so those changes, they really do make a difference in real time. Accelerate into that, the highest population we've ever seen in history, the new technology we've got that allows us to connect quicker, move around quicker, move bits of information faster. And

then you're going to accelerate some of those pressures because decision making when you're going at speed is more dangerous and difficult than when you're going slowly. So, you know, we know that when we drive our cars. I'm not a pilot, but I suspect flying a plane is the same thing. And those margins for error start to become narrower. So the world, as Kevin Rudd calls it, the decade of living dangerously,

regardless of one's political persuasion or where you are listening to the world to this, it's quite hard to not think past that. But I promise you, it could be a lot, lot worse. So let's talk about some specific stops on the Silk Routes, which you have examined. I mean, I think over the last 50 years, I would observe we've moved from two power blocks, US and Russia. We had the fall of the Berlin Wall. For a moment, it seemed like it might be unipolar. And now we're

in a world that appears to be multipolar with China, India, you know, the malevolent thorn that is Putin's Russia and these other immense countries. And I'd like to talk about a few of them. And the logical place, I guess, for me is to start with China and the Belt and Road

initiative, which didn't seem so long ago that Cameron and Osborne here in the UK were cozying up to China. And now we've gone into a very different environment. What appeared to some as sort of laudable appears now to others as maybe more insidious. How do you reflect on the Belt and Road initiative?

Well, as usual, we started asking maybe the right question years too late. So people now heard of the Belt and Road and think it's a terrible thing. Major funding stopped in about 2018, which is quite a long time ago. You know, that's long before Covid. That was the Russian World Cup in football, where perhaps looking back on it, that should have had a boycott attached to it.

as well. So look, I think Belt and Road was designed as a signature of China's foreign economic policy to achieve lots of different things. And there is a master plan element to it, but it's also pretty disparate. So some of it was about developing the western parts of China, which are economically undeveloped, home to minority populations, some of whom have had a lot of exposure in the levels of persecution, like Uyghurs, for example. Some of it was about moving China's manufacturing capacity into neighbouring countries.

which is not in itself necessarily a bad thing. As China switches its economic model or tries to switch its economic model, finding new markets, that doesn't seem to me entirely implausible. And then the idea of galvanizing infrastructure to increase connectivity is familiar to anybody who works in development economics.

that the challenge was that because the Belt and Road seemed to present like it was monolithic, it started to attract commentary and criticism, sometimes justifiably and sometimes otherwise, particularly for things like debt diplomacy, that China was somehow lending in order to trap. And that became a narrative that managed to get away from Beijing, I suppose. And I'm not here to say whether that's good or bad, but just to say that that's what happened. In fact, if you look at the continent of Africa as a whole,

About 12% of total debt is owed to China or Chinese entities or state-owned entities, which is reasonably modest. So the challenge in emerging parts of the world, developing parts of the world and middle and low-income countries is there's an almost insatiable appetite for infrastructure, for roads, for railways, for clean power, clean energy, renewables, for sanitation, for schools, for facilities. And that money's got to come from somewhere.

And I can promise you in almost every single country I work on, it would be great if that came from the UK or from Europe or from the US or from the World Bank. But in a lot of cases, country risk attached is either too high or the returns are exorbitant. So China's left as the only show in town. So there have been a few blowups, some are quite high profile, where China has lent, perhaps irresponsibly, perhaps thoughtlessly, but always at the invitation of the host country. And some of those have created strategic problems.

potential problems. So for example, the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka is the poster boy, poster child of a kind of bad project. But it was a project where the developers defaulted pretty much straight away. Sri Lanka struggles to attract foreign direct investment anyway. Dollar denominated loans, it all went wrong and China was left holding a port that Sri Lanka wanted that

that potentially has some long-term use. But you as a financier, you don't want to be holding a distressed asset that has no value. And if it suddenly in 20, 30, 40 years' time, you can renegotiate and you can put in Chinese naval vessels, which you can't currently do, then maybe there's a value. But bad debt is bad debt. Someone sits at the end of that.

And sometimes we can think that China doesn't mind, doesn't operate by the same rules of money that the normal lending institutions do. But most of the projects, the economist evaluating 10 years of Belt and Road in 2023, most of the projects have been pretty good. Most of them have worked quite well. Most of them have invested in infrastructure reasonably sensibly. And that doesn't seem to me, if you are a rising power,

to look for alliances, to look for friendships, to look for networks that can enhance your own economy. That doesn't look to me that it's necessarily threatening. The problem is I think we didn't benchmark what China was doing. We didn't think about what our response would be.

We did a lot of finger wagging saying don't do this and don't borrow. But we haven't invested in any way or shape or form in a way that would be meaningful. So we don't teach children about other parts of the world, for example, in schools. We talked about that before. And I think we don't think about what these...

other places mean to us beyond how can we boost our UK economy or the global economy. And it turns out that there's no such thing as a regional economy anymore. Everything is globalised. All supply chains have heavy global components. And here we suddenly find ourselves asking questions about resilience of basic supplies, not just critical minerals and rare earths, but the fact that China has a monopoly position in a lot of industries that mean that we in the West are

are potentially very highly exposed. And the only way out of it, which is what Trump is trying to do, force manufacturing back to the US, which triggers inflation and makes goods certainly more expensive, possibly worse. So, you know, I think we're at that point where those ideas about globalisation that Cameron and Osborne seem to embrace, you know, maybe they weren't wrong to do that, but we should have thought about what the guardrails should be. And I suppose to put it in a wider context, we didn't think about that with social media. We didn't think about it with climate.

The cheap goods that have helped European and Western economies grow for the last 20 years came at huge pollution and warming risks and costs to countries with lower labour forces and lower environmental protection. We didn't put those guardrails in place with what Russia meant. So one of the questions is, how should we be regulating to stop similar kinds of problems come towards us? I spent this morning doing AI stuff.

And these conversations look very familiar around, are we going to spend 10 years, 10 years down the line, are we going to say we were too late with that too? But China, I think, charting its rise, seeing Belt and Road, I think we misdiagnosed, didn't understand what it was. And when we did, we then got it wrong by assuming everything was malign rather than picking apart the bits that really do matter, perhaps the bit that were less important.

So I note in your epilogue to the update to the Silk Roads, you make the point which surprised me. In fact, the biggest investor in Africa in the last decade has been the Gulf and Middle Eastern countries, which... Not by a bit, by a substantial. Last year, the UAE invested three times more, almost four times more than China did. So there are new players in the international relations community. The current vogue is called middle powers, which means they have capacity to behave in ways that allow them to use their leverage...

Old-fashioned historians like me just said that's what diplomatic policy looks like. You work out what it is you want and what you need. You work out what the future is going to look like. You make sure you're not caught out of position and you prepare. And I think a lot of the countries that I write about in my book, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, have forward-looking plans. Like in a business plan, it doesn't mean you're going to get it right. Sometimes a business plan means you get it wrong because you don't course-correct.

But here in Europe, I think our default is we would just like time to stand still. We're not comfortable with these new threats. But if you were to say to any frontline European politician, what do you think Europe in 2040 looks like or Europe in 2050? They'd struggle to recognise what that question is. And that's not because we're democracies and we have elections to worry about. It's that we've forgotten that process of

of thinking ahead. I don't want to leave China without asking you one question, because as I re-listened to that interview, you made the observation that China historically wasn't a colonizing nation. When we look at some of the stats, Chinese shipyards built more tonnage, as you've written, in 2024 alone than the US has built since the end of the Second World War. We've got military exhibitions, shall we say, going on around the Taiwan Straits, etc. Is that still right?

China was a coloniser for its what's now mainland China. So 300 years ago, China was about half the size to what it is now. The Qing moved into Xinjiang and into Tibet, into Mongolia, but it didn't build a grand global empire in the way that European states did. So 100 years ago, just before the First World War, Belgium controlled most of West Africa. The Portuguese had a global empire across multiple continents. So the Ottomans, lots of people did.

China, I think, had a different trajectory. So are there pinch points now? Hong Kong, Macau, Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, and of course, Taiwan, the kind of, from a Chinese perspective, I guess, a missing piece. But I think by and large, there's a single Chinese military base abroad in Djibouti, in the Red Sea. But otherwise, you know, you don't find Chinese military bases. Now, it might be that changes.

There are places which could potentially be dual use. There'd be lots of anxiety about Porta Piraeus, for example, in Athens, which is controlled by a Chinese state-owned enterprise, that that may have some kind of dual reuse military capacity, but that would require the Greek government. And I'd find it hard to imagine that China will start parking aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, but you never know. But I think that from the... I spent a lot of time trying to understand things from other people's perspectives and

But by and large, the Chinese default position is the West is here to manage or stop the rise of China.

And therefore, the ways in which that's likely to happen are by compromising energy imports, food imports, and have strategic leverage over China, which Taiwan, from a Chinese perspective, looks like a sort of forward attack base. Now, that might sound crazy to all of us. That might sound beyond the realms of conceivability that there might one day be a Western attack on mainland China using Taiwan.

But, you know, Chinese IR specialists, when they talk about it, they're not stupid. We'll say, look at interventions in the Middle East, look at interventions in Afghanistan, look at what happens in Ukraine. Actually, the West quite often weighs in on decisions that it thinks preserve its own stability or its own advantage. And we can't exclude the idea that the US fleet that's in the Indo-Pacific may turn out to be not just conducting freedom of navigation operations. And I think what we're missing is how to allay those fears, what we're missing is how to

while keeping a strategic balance. So I think that China, in terms of its willingness to invest militarily in other countries, it's willing to sell its hardware. It's willing to do that quite aggressively. We've seen drain raids over Sudan in the last month using Chinese kit, very heavy equipment.

militarisation of pretty good quality stuff in the engagement between India and Pakistan recently where Chinese military kit outperformed Russian kit that India relied on and outperformed what we can tell or think outperformed French Rafale jets

that China's quite a good marketer of high-tech kit and a military kit too. But I don't think it's the same type of power, at least not yet, that looks in terms of how does it go to take over space, territory and so on.

That might change. There is a large group, particularly with young people in China, that keep looking at the maps of Russia and talking about what land was taken by the Russians over the course of the last 200 years. Very lively debates about names of cities and whether those should be changed. So that might well be something that comes in the future. But for now, China looks to me like a country that is pretty cautious. It's very risk averse.

It doesn't engage in a malign way within global institutions. It tries to blend and build alliances. It's not averse to finding the dark arts to convince people to vote alongside it. But it's keen to say that it wants reform within its own terms.

And that doesn't mean it's not a threat, but that looks very different to me to what Russia does, for example. So let's shift down to India, the other great population power. They watched much of this. They have enacted their India East Act policy. They've got a much better demographic profile and I think more home to more

more billionaires after the US and China than anywhere else with an interesting investment dimension because accessing their equity markets has proved to be more tricky for Western investors. And certainly the valuation, India looks expensive, China looks cheap, one's got more geopolitical risks. And how do you assess India's ambitions?

I think it's a very good question. I've already given quite long answers. Look, I think India quite rightly wants to play, wants to be in every club it can join. I think it wants to play at every table. And that doesn't seem to me to be either a bad idea. In fact, it looks like a very good one. So India's got very close relationships with Russia.

It currently has become Europe's largest source of oil because of imports that come from Russia and recycled through India. It's allowed and enabled and put mechanics in place to allow Russian capital to find homes through Indian banks, which some in the West are very unhappy about, perhaps not surprisingly. It has quite a close relationship with Iran, investments in Chabahar in particular. It's looked to increase its investments and its relationships with the Middle East as a whole.

with the Gulf region, has the IMEC, the India Middle East Corridor, ending up in Haifa. And, you know, you don't need to be a geopolitical specialist to work out that a Hindu country, predominantly Hindu country with lots of minorities, but the largest one being Muslim ones who are under pretty severe pressure in political mainstream and through the rule of law,

to be able to have relationships with Shia Muslim country in Iran, with Sunni Muslims in the Gulf, with what looks like now almost exclusively Jewish leadership in Israel, where minorities have been pushed out as well. That requires quite an ability to stay ahead of oncoming traffic. It's a difficult set to play. But India is looking eastwards as well, as you mentioned. It's trouble spots, I think, its relationship with China.

But that very tense relationship that has gone back many decades, actually, to the war in the early 1960s and has seen military confrontation at the border in the last five years has largely dampened down primarily because of very heavy lobbying by Indian business interests to try to find a channel through because India and China are both extremely important trade partners to each other. So I think that there's lots of the geopolitical stuff that India wants to be friends with everybody.

while playing its own course. But for example, it's quite tricky if you're taking top-level military hardware from Russia, but to then be a cornerstone of US-Indo-Pacific relationships through the Quad. So at some point, you probably have to try and navigate whether you're being forced to take sides. And it looks to me that that world of the US are being very insistent of saying, this is the price of friendship. This is what you get in return.

that that may not necessarily be a crazy policy that Trump is pursuing either. But it's very clear that that's what the US are trying to do, is to say you either pick me or you pick our competitors, China, to some extent Russia, Iran, and so on. And the question would be what decision the government in India will take on that. And it doesn't look to me clear. And you've looked at India as an investor for a long, long time. Those walls and barriers have stayed up

You know, it's a tricky place to invest for lots of different reasons. And probably, although the demographics, median age is much lower than China, the opportunities are much greater. The climate factor is obviously something to think about for the short and midterm. But there's lots of positive signs on infrastructure investment that means that India today looks very different to what it did 10 years ago.

Well, before we leave Asia, only because I'm on a plane to Indonesia on Saturday to hopefully meet up with my son who's traveling around that part of the world. So that's serious. I hope he's there for work. Yeah, I hope that since it's a year between school and university, he's getting ready for work. But Indonesia, 280 million people, fourth largest country in the world, absolutely central to nickel, electric car battery sort of equation.

Again, it's so easy just to forget these huge populations and countries. And when you think about those others, how are they siding with the great powers? Well, Indonesia is one of my favourite countries. The island of Java has a bigger population than Russia.

That would tell you if you're thinking of it as an investor, you might make your calculations slightly differently. But we miss all this stuff, I think, most of the time here. So in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, there have been major boycotts of McDonald's, of KFC, of Starbucks, because these are perceived to be American businesses. And the way in which the US is behaving in Gaza and Israel, the support they're giving to the government of Netanyahu,

has led to public protests and to shuttering of these shops. And that is a kind of reality, I think, that affects multi-billion dollar corporations that if you're not paying attention, then things start to look...

complicated in a country of 230 million people. And then you mentioned their importance in nickel in particular, battery supply. Indonesia, like other countries, is trying to play both ways. So they've got a reasonably close relationship with the US and with Australia. They've just conducted naval operations, joint naval operations. A couple of weeks after that, they conduct their first naval operation with the Russian Navy.

Talk about having a Russian air base and possibly Chinese air base in parts of Indonesia, set the feathers flying. And, you know, if you're Indonesia, feathers flying and local neighboring governments or governments far away getting in a flat probably gives you leverage if you know what you want in return. So it doesn't just work where the U.S. will say this is the price for being my friend.

Other states are going to play that game too. And I think one of those questions about global security is what does that envelope look like and who is providing comfort in a world where we are probably back in an age of state-on-state violence?

where states are going to look to use their competitive advantage against each other through the use of force. And that architecture that we grew up with of the UN, of an ability to try and dampen things down, maybe the threats of nuclear weapons was like that. But now the problem is the costs and the ability to conduct sub-threshold attacks on infrastructure, sabotage through cyber, etc. Those costs are so low that we probably go into a world that's more volatile. And volatility is great if you're a hedge fund.

Volatility is obviously more difficult if you're long only and you're trying to think about long trends and how those play out because small things can have major and catastrophic impacts. One of the things I've been working on recently is on...

on fragility and why is it the big empires can be brought down by little pinpricks? But that not just can happen, that's usually what happens. And just in the context of Indonesia Nickel, I am in the process of reading that terrific book, Material World, by Ed Conway, and that's illuminating as to the whole supply chains and unexpected sources of these. Ed's book is great. It reminds us that although we're all very excited about

software and capabilities of our tech if you don't have the kit to build it then you're in trouble and you know we've seen the kind of energy demands that AI have I mean I put in the same category things like water in a warming world the ability to cool the ability to keep servers running you know means that there are those are risks and I think that where there's a whole host of

of risks from the natural world, risks from the geopolitical world that are not just underpriced. I think they're unpriced and they're not built in at all. And I'd be much more worried about shocks than I would be about opportunities. You know, we're talking a time when the markets are nice and full. We're past the thresholds of Liberation Day. Everybody thinks that Trump is back in the saddle and we're going to be OK. And all these

Deals are going to be all right with the penguins, uninhabited islands, as well as with China. But there are lots and lots of things that can go wrong. And small shocks can have magnifying impacts. One country that you've written about know well, and I did just want to ask a specific question, and that's Iran.

Asian theocracy, I think youngest population in the world, but with maybe a mismatch of expectations, fabulous history, how might that play out? I think it's fair to say that the clouds are either going to part or they're going to converge because of what's been playing out in Gaza and in Palestine. Iran's primary concern of the theocrats, the mullahs who run it,

is regime stability. I mean, that's the signature that keeps China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, very different countries, keeps them all together, which is that they have the same three aims, which is regime stability, regime stability, and regime stability. And if you can find tools that you can help that through surveillance, for example. But, you know, those things are easy if you can control all the airwaves.

literally as well, as well as all the networks. So, for example, when there were protests in 2022 and 2023, the Iranian leadership saw those as opportunities to work out where pockets of resistance were.

So you can identify who's unhappy and you can deal with them sometimes through force, but also through high levels of intimidation, surveillance, whatever. So if your aim is to stay in power, then you've got unlimited flexibility of what that posture might look like. And I think Iran is more pragmatic than often we think about here. It's not just people sort of thinking that there's a religious conviction. It's about how do you make sure that the structure stays in place? And Iran, as I write in my book,

has fought three cold wars for the last 40 years with about 2% of the US defence budget, concurrently taking on Israel and Saudi Arabia and the great Satan, the US. And at some point, you have to recognise that they are quite good at what they do. There's a huge human price for it. But there are question marks, I think, about how Iran sees itself in the wider world. That's something I'm going to spend a lot of time later this year working on about, you know,

reading through better what Iranian IR scholars, business people, and as far as you can, to work out what does Central Asia look like to Iranian scholars? It's really important that we understand that better here in the West. Well, we can't leave this area without talking about those Central Asian countries. I think you probably travel more than anyone I know to that point. How many flights have you taken to Central Asia in the last two years? I've been there a bit. I just got back from Tajikistan, where the

The question is all about water and glacier melt. And that's a real critical problem. Central Asia is warming twice as fast as most other parts of the world. Kyrgyzstan has lost 1,000 glaciers in the last 20 years. And so water availability, I think, is something that we should all be thinking about. And it's not just Central Asia. These are countries we don't really know. That's India, Pakistan. It's critical. And the Colorado, places in the United States, it's something which I think the alarm bells are ringing.

and we should be thinking quite hard about what those cascade impacts might be. But yeah, I know Central Asia well.

And of course, that brings us to Russia, because they were all part of the sort of, you know, or certainly connected for so long. You made a, put a lovely expression in the last interview, which is Russia has historically played a weak hand well. How do you appraise their hand now? I've never disagreed with myself. I'm too polite to disagree with anybody. I think that's probably about right. That sounds very, that sounds very, very wise. Maybe I said it. I think that's, I think that's right. I mean, you know,

I think the challenge is that I think Putin is not quite sure what it is that he wants. But he has unlimited resources and time to be able to disrupt. And we have to work out what that means for us here in the UK and in Europe, how much we're willing to lean in to work out what implications it has for us directly as well as indirectly. And the fact we're still fuzzy about that

Three years into this invasion and more than 10 years after Russia occupied Crimea tells me that our speed of response here, out of analysis, same with Belt and Road, you know, that you need to be addressing these geopolitical things a bit like you do in business, which is when there's something that's new, you've got to get your A-team on it straight away to try and work out what you're...

seeing what might you be getting wrong and to decide your response. And we're very, very slow. But I mean, it's interesting. I was in the Baltic states last year where in the summer, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs put up on its website at five o'clock on a Friday evening, a statement that said, we demand the right to revisit all territorial boundaries in the Baltic region.

Within half an hour, the Finnish Prime Minister, President and Defence Minister had had a conference call, put up on the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement going, we welcome that because we've got longstanding grievances about Finnish territory that's been taken by the Russians. And then it got taken off the MFA site in Russia. So that kind of constant testing of the fences, you need to have a mechanic in place that you can respond in real time. I mean, I say that on a day where Macron's announced that he's going to go to Greenland.

which probably should have done six months ago when Trump first mentioned it. I mean, by the time again this comes out, the United States might have annexed Greenland. But I think that that speed of recognising that where response matters, we need to be better at lining up our ducks. You know, a couple of days ago, we've had Fiona Hill say that the UK is currently in a state of war with Russia.

And that got almost no coverage anywhere in the mainstream press. It was currently The Guardian, to be fair. But that should be setting anybody in front of a trading terminal, anybody who's in geopolitics, anybody in the NGO, anybody who lives near Russia, to ask whether she's right. But what does that mean for them?

So you referenced some of Trump's positioning a couple of times and you write in the epilogue that you sent me that his abrasive, derogatory and overconfident language has gone down badly in many parts of Asia. Not surprisingly. Hasn't gone down that well in Europe, I think. But, you know, he has, to be fair. It meant that Europe now is going to invest in its defence rather than get American taxpayers to fund it. And you can't, you know, the way he's done it has been

terrible, but that's an outcome that probably we should put in the plus column. Well, we're going to come back to Europe, you know, in a minute. But I wondered, you know, I wondered referencing your earlier comments about Trump, whether he is forcing many of those other nations outside of China and India to take sides or whether they're all going to try and play both sides of the equation. I think from many of their perspectives, there isn't another side of the equation.

That's the problem. The US seems to have degraded its global position. And, you know, reputations can be rebuilt, but it just takes a long time. So I think if you gut the State Department, as is happening, if you shut down Voice of America, if you kill off USAID, that, you know, according to Oxfam, will lead to 3 million extra deaths, 20 million children without food and schools, you know, then you look like a less...

attractive partner as well as a less reliable one. So Trump is very impulsive. He says things, he then scrolls back. We're getting used to the fact, second time round, that it's a kind of Netflix box set, that there's always a cliffhanger. It's quite tiring. It's maybe narcissistic. Maybe it's his personality disorder. Maybe it's his skill, whichever way you want to look at it.

But that noise is very unhelpful. But I think some of the discussions it's provoked is, what does the world look like where we can't rely on the US for defence, where we need to look for different trade partners? As you know, a lot of the growth we've seen in the last 10 years has been, for example, into ASEAN trade, how Southeast Asia is growing together without competition or without trading with the US. And I think that those will now accelerate. So, you know, if I was Tim Cook...

and I had 70% of my sales or whatever it is, 75% of my sales outside the United States, I'd be thinking quite hard about do I repatriate the whole of my business operation and costs back to the US where there might be a new

or a Democrat president or a different personality who changes things, those costs to build what I need take time. It's having that volatility. But when you're confronted with a volatile leader, you probably do try to enhance your corporations with your closest trading partners and with your neighbours. And that does...

obviously opened the door to China. It opened the door for lots of conversations. I mean, I think ironically it opened the door for us here in the UK. And if we were more nimble, we would have enhanced, boosted up trade missions and senior politicians doing the rounds. But I don't see them. So I was in Kazakhstan last week. And apart from the fact my plane was filled with French ministers, Georgia Maloney turned up the next morning on Friday, eight o'clock in Kazakhstan. And it would be great to see

Brits lean in as well. But I think we see ourselves as a financial centre where we don't need to play hardball with hard resources, but we should probably wake up and recognise that we do.

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So in that European context, you know, I think 10 billion has been committed to the Trans-Caspian transport corridor that you said is going to cut journey times for freight between Europe and Central Asia by half. Europe has been given opportunity to re-engineer itself on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of optimism and ability to cooperate. Look, we've got, whatever, 13 battle tanks in Europe. Probably we should. There's one American one.

The problem with the amount of money that's been announced for spend into defence, you know, German investment will go to German companies, Spanish investment will go to Spanish companies. And probably that's not the most efficient way to be investing capital. It should be what's the best to breed and how do we work out who's best at what? And maybe we should be specialists rather than all trying to be generalists. So, you know, I think that the European project looks to me shaky. I mean, I was in with the Baltic Defence Forces 10 years ago and I said,

I, you know, the risks in Russia are quantifiable, they're known, the responses that you would have are things that you've rehearsed time and time again. But I said, well, I'd be worried about if I was you, would be the dependency of NATO and the dependency of your European partners. And, you know, I've been in Spain and Portugal, as I know you have recently. And some of those discussions in the defence corridors and the foreign affairs is that we're sympathetic to what's happening in Ukraine, but it's a long way from us and it doesn't involve us.

And the way to correct that is to say when Ukraine got invaded, food prices spiked. So we're now globally about 20% above pre-pandemic prices. Lots of different reasons. Some of it about supply, some to do with climate stress. Russia's harvest has been terrible this year for lots of different crops. Unusually high spring, unusually warm spring, followed by terrible frosts.

But these things are global. The global energy prices mean that we're all in it together. So I think I'm sanguine about what Europe's faults are. I don't want to talk it down.

But in terms of how do we respond, I mean, I'll give you one simple fact, which is that Europe spent more money importing energy from Russia since 2022 than supporting Ukraine. And probably that's the wrong way around. If you're really serious about trying to support a country on the side, on the edge of Europe, Ukraine, that's what it means, or whether you think that Russia is not going to be a long-term competitor or threat and it's going to go away, you can let the inhabitants of Ukraine cope. My view is that

that world of great power competition involves all of us and how we get onto that kind of footing we should be talking about more.

And education, when you sit in the heart of it, accounts for three quarters of STEM graduates. There's disaffection with US universities. You set up in Oxford. Is this a great chance to grab some intellectual capital from the US? And we're not China, we're not the US. I'd like to say yes. And I tend to try and pull my punches when I'm talking about it, particularly with education, because it sets people off. But

You know, Brexit hasn't killed higher education, but it's made the barrier much harder for places like mine, or universities like mine, to recruit the best talent in Europe because it now costs three times more

for a European to come and do their PhD or to study in Oxford than it did before Brexit when we were part of the European Union. So that means that obviously the best talent will try to find the home that will be the most rewarding and the least financially damaging. So that puts us out of position, I think. We still have some of the very best in the world across multiple different disciplines. So we are a tract of net talent.

But, you know, probably if I was an enlightened government and had a magic wand and could sell it to the public, which are beyond my skill set and definitely above my job competence, finding ways to attract global talent to the UK into university sectors.

wouldn't seem, would seem to me like an open goal that we're going to probably fluff because it requires a bit of political bravery and we've got to stay, and it avoids steering into the winds where it looks like you're looking after the elites rather than everybody else. But yeah, those opportunities are absolutely there. But, you know, again, I write in my book,

The level of talent across STEM, engineering, AI, hard sciences, and the productivity of new papers and new research, availability of critical materials. It paints a pretty telling picture of the direction of travel. So, you know, 10 years ago, there was one Chinese university in the top 10. And that's why the United States has done so well in the 20th and 21st centuries. You know, Harvard's endowment we look at with some jealousy.

even if Trump goes for them, $65 billion, whatever it is, a pretty good cushion to fall back on. So you need to stay competitive and you need to live on your wits rather than just assume that, you know, because we televised the boat race, that that's enough on its own. So I'm very proud of my colleagues and the work that they do. They are world-class across so many different areas. But, you know, we need to preserve that pipeline and build it up rather than let it thin out.

When we think about the investing lens, we had Chris Wood on the other day actually making an interesting statement, which is he would prefer to own emerging market debt rather than G7 debt because of all sorts of the dynamics that are at play. You invest yourself. What are your priorities and preferences? I'm risk averse. So I've got a few sort of attempts to try to pick out what I think might happen with quantum and emerging technologies markets.

you know, with edge technologies in particular, but things that might are sort of moonshots because that I think, you know, is important to think about tomorrow as well as today. But, you know, as a historian, I think I know what lethality looks like and high mortality rates and population collapse. But, you know, so I look at the big long distance trends. I'm much more useful, I think, to think about those. And, you know, when you

Read through what's coming. Some of it is reasonably straightforward to predict. I mean, last year in South Korea, more strollers for pets were sold than strollers for infants.

Right. More adult diapers were sold in Japan and in South Korea than for kids. So you've got that demographic problem coming towards you. That's fixable. I mean, that presents lots of different problems and opportunities. Right. If you want to fix pensions, if you want to fix social care and so on, there are all sorts of ways you can do it. And in fact, someone like you, Simon, would relish looking at these big numbers because you can trim those budgets reasonably efficiently. But, you know, for example, I was doing something recently.

yesterday on how the world has changed in the last 30, 40 years. And Baltic states it's nearly 10 years greater life expectancy than since the end of the Soviet Union. Not match men and women. Women live 10 years longer than men. Once you know that, then you might think about pension age. You might think about reform and care in different ways. In the UK, we've again exponentially got much healthier, much fitter. So retirement age 100 years ago made much more sense than today.

So, you know, I think it's how do you address those kinds of problems? And those look like they're quite a challenge, but quite exciting. But I think those fundamentals are probably going to drive the main motives of the 20th, 21st century. But it's subject to global stability, lack of war. I'm very worried about emerging infectious diseases.

and pandemics, not just for zoonotic and jumping into human chains, but also into food supplies. And so I'm extremely cautious about what downside looks like. If I wake up a couple of quid richer tomorrow than today, I'm very happy. What I don't want to do is lose my shirt.

So I have a pretty negative view of what might happen. That means you miss the great upswings. But there are people who are smarter than me who work out how to ride that wave. And I look at them with great admiration because you've got to be brave to take risks. But I'd much rather look at those big long distance trends and try and

anticipate what they mean. And if I draw some of this together, is it too simple to say that the sun rising in the east means that it's gradually setting on the west? No, I think it's not an either or. But the idea that the United States has lost position, that it's a failing economy, that looks completely crazy to me when you look at the fundamentals, when you look at the size of the US economy. I mean, I'd be worried about the national debt

and the debt ceilings and the ability for, you know, what that means for the dollar and for treasury bonds and so on. But, you know, I think that the idea that we want to make things turn the clock back, it tells you that you feel that things are going against you. You know, so again, in my epilogue, you know, comments from people like Marco Rubio saying that the world order acts not just only not in America's interest, it acts against it.

We've seen the U.S. voting alongside Russia at the U.N., refusing to condemn a declaration against the aggression of Russia and Ukraine. And it's bewildering to see that world order seemingly go up in flames. But I think in large parts of Asia, it's kind of if you work hard,

the world of tomorrow will be better than the world of today. And that makes you invest in a different way. That makes you look for friendships in different ways. That makes you benchmark your risks in slightly different ways. So I don't think it's an either or. But here, our lack of productivity, our lack of being able to scale up businesses in a way that allows us to attract IPOs, that doesn't look like the most natural home for really ambitious entrepreneurs.

Money isn't everything, although I suspect if you listen to this podcast and have got this far in, you might disagree. But that tells you that engaging with what the global reality looks like means that we will sit in the shallow waters rather than head out into the open seas. And the open seas are where you can scale, you can frame arguments, you can win and also lose great fortunes. But you're part of the mainstream. And my worry is that Europe feels that it's becoming peripheral.

again. Which is what its role was, by the way. I mean, if you read the Silk Roads, you know, we weren't the centre of learning, you know, the dark ages in Europe, where nothing happened between the Romans and the Battle of Hastings. And then as far as I could tell, nothing really happened after that, until Henry VIII. Then it all got exciting if you were European, because it suddenly turned out that if you were in Spain and Portugal, or France or Britain had accessed the Atlantic, the Americas, you could extract almost unlimited amounts of

silver and gold. You could export almost unlimited amounts of manpower and women across the Atlantic as slaves, as enslaved labour to work for free. And that can make you rich. You build very nice country houses in Lincolnshire and wherever you wanted. That world is now fundamentally changing. And I think it's been doing that for quite a long time.

Maybe 100 years, but certainly the last 20 or 30, it's accelerated. So before I move to my rapid fire, put you on the spot questions, we can't miss out Africa. Population growth, I think, faster than anywhere else in the world. It's an important part of the equation that is often overlooked in investing circles. Yeah, and I think we're asleep. I mean, last year, UAE put four times more money into Africa than China did.

And that's part of energy transitions. That's part of metals. That's part of agriculture. That's part of being part of global questions and answers. I think that we're forgetting a continent that is young, has enormous amounts of potential and significant, massive underinvestment. There are lots of historic reasons for that that have deep, deep roots and often very painful ones. But I'm sort of quite optimistic about the level and pace of change. You know, digitalisation is...

and renewables can accelerate some of these opportunities in lots of different parts of Africa very quickly. The question is whether governance can keep up. But I mean, China's been looking at Africa as a Russia for a long time. So I think we've now got, what, 10 defence ministers who've been trained at the Chinese Military Academy. We've got about 10 heads of defence

African nations armed forces who've been trained with Chinese technologies and again through with the Chinese armed forces and those Investments are ones that I think the British used to do, you know at Santos you bring in leaders from other parts of world you check you'd try and try and headhunt who you thought would be important for the future We had lots of those pipelines through our great universities not just Oxford and Cambridge But to try to build up long-term alliances and I think we've got used here in the West to people coming to us and

rather than going out and looking for consolidation. So that story of different parts of Africa, I think, is a really important one to factor in about how those silk roads are reaching into to help build up capacity in ways that will pay different kinds of dividends to different people.

Okay, so here we go. We're going general, we're going broad. You're very much in demand. Who wants you most and how do you prioritise? The people who are most responsive and the most interesting are always in defence because they have very limited budgets and they are ravenous for ideas and extremely engaged in listening and they're great to talk to. I've never met anybody across any country where the questions aren't great and also they listen.

Corporates, likewise, they've got their P&Ls to protect. So looking for competitive advantage and looking for curiosity of ideas, particularly the more senior you go, because you've got people like you with this broad span of interests. And so they're great. Governments, by and large, are polite, but inert and take a long time to make things happen.

run through the system. As you know, I love my academic colleagues, but we struggle sometimes to break through into the public debate and into shaping policies. So I think there's always a degree to which when there's a, as in fact, as a colleague of mine put it this morning, the closer you are to getting shot

the more innovative you are. And I think that people who are at the front end of pressure are being pretty quick to innovate and to think about different ways of doing things. So, you know, some of those discussions about what do soldiers in the future look like, probably being handy with a video controller and wearing flip-flops and being able to stay awake for 22 hours in front of a screen

It's probably quite a good capability that soldiers of the past didn't need to have. They need to run up Snowdon with 40 kilos on their back. Those things are changing. So I think those kinds of discussions are interesting ones. It was Churchill, I think, who said the most exhilarating thing in the world is to be shot out without being hit. Chagos Islands, lousy deal? Do you know what? I got asked about the Chagos Islands about 20 years ago.

Ed Miliband was running to be Labour leader. And, you know, I know him a little bit, not well. And we were talking about, you know, the kinds of questions he got asked and what he'd be prepped on. And he said, I keep getting asked about the Chagos Islands. This was, you know, more than 10 years ago. And I said, funny you mentioned that, because I know quite a lot about the Chagos, because Diego Garcia, apart from being home to a military airbase, is the only proper source of natural water in the Indian Ocean.

So you can run your logistics because you don't need to be constantly bringing either desalinating or importing vast amounts of drinking water. So I think that the long term is how do you keep that as a Western base that is very important for the US, UK and others? And how do you keep other competitors out?

But I think it looks to me that that's the kind of the first of many similar kinds of questions we're going to have. It's got a natural parallel, by the way, with the Red Sea Corridor, where Qatar, Turkey, you know, you name it, China, US, UK, France, Saudi, all are militarizing. So choke points, areas that look like that they are strategically significant, we're suddenly in an age of new competition. So our friends in Beijing, I say, you know, figuratively, were very invested in helping Mauritius recover.

dislodge a Chagos deal. Mauritius was the first free trade deal that China did with any country in the world because it pays great attention to what those strategic points of interest look like. So it didn't come as a great surprise to me that it suddenly hit the news a year ago, but it's something I've been looking at for a while. Ravi Joseph, who's chair of Man Street Capital, a friend of the show, said for a history buff who wants to visit parts of the Silk Road...

and see history and culture at work, what would be top of the list to visit? Well, I should probably get that right. People sometimes talk about the Silk Road like it's the M1. There's a start and a beginning. The Silk Road was an idea about how networks work, primarily about between India, China and Central Asia thousands of years ago.

So, you know, you could take your pick. And my view is that when we're talking about connections and long distance ones, you know, when you start to find images of Buddha in graves in Stockholm or outside Stockholm from more than a thousand years ago, then Stockholm can fit as part of the Silk Roads if you want it to. But I mean, the kind of the jewel sites, I guess, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Bukhara, Kiva, I wouldn't ignore the glorious natural beauty of the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

you know all those sites in northern India in classic Central Asian style the Taj Mahal

you know the tomb of humayun all recognizable but you know i think one would one one would one would try and pick pick the highlights i i it's quite hard to beat registan partly because it's still not there's still not that many people there regista regista is the main square in samarkand and it's absolutely mind-blowing in terms of the scale the wealth the world that once was so it's a bit like but you know go to venice it's the same thing which is

particularly as an investor, why did anybody think building a palace on a canal would be a good long-term investment? So when you go to see places that were big in the past and good in the past, I dare say it might make you think twice about those nice big mansions in Notting Hill and whether people are going to walk around London in 100 years' time from different parts of the world

and say, God, did people really think that that was a smart way to invest their wealth? And why would they pay 30 or 40 million quid over David Beckham's house costs or others who live around that part of town? Could they not see that the world was changing? Could they not see that it's going to be American tourists who are going to come to buy goods to take back to the US because the trade tariffs suddenly make Louis Vuitton much more expensive in the US than outside?

that instead of seeing Chinese visitors at Vista Village, maybe it's going to be Americans or Brits coming to buy cut price bargain luxury goods. So I think I'd head to Samarkand and Bukhara, but there are so many parts, it's unlimited the amount of fun you can have. You run a podcast. Which side of the microphone do you prefer to be?

Your side, asking questions. Much better. I love moderating because you need to be on your toes as you always are with your guests. But also, I know how much research you do. The first time you interviewed me,

You were carrying like an A4 ring binder. And I was like, is that your memoirs you're writing? My first three months in August. And, you know, to do your research so you can get someone to talk, it's a real skill. So I love doing that. I'm not mad about being put on the spot, which is why I give quite long answers. But yeah.

You know, I don't write books very often. And I also don't come out to play and talk about my work to anybody all the time. But, you know, what Money Maze has done, which has been so fantastic, is to focus on such an important part of not just investing, but to try to globalise, to try to think about these big picture stuff. And, you know, you do it so well week after week. So I'm very happy to come here. But I probably on balance prefer your job.

of asking the questions because you, you know, getting someone to talk is, is also, you know, it's a joy. Well, that's very nice of you. I'm very honest to you. So the last two questions of course, come from Will Campion. I don't know why he thinks they should concern sport and alcohol. I don't know if that's any reflection of him or you, but he did say, you know, drinks cabinet. We have one here in the studio now. Were you offered a martini and Negroni or a Walsh McCormick? Which would it be? I think I'd take a martini, but I wouldn't let Will Campion mix it because I,

I think when we had the first time we were out of unlocked in lockdown, I had a very bad martini experience where I, I like to blame Will. I'm sure he blamed me and probably he's right. Thinking about it. So one of those, and I was talking even more gibberish than usual. So no, I, I, martini is my go-to. I mean, I know there's a bit of a, bit of a thing going on at the moment.

But I think when I'm at an airport lounge and I've got a flight, that's what will knock me out. And that's because we have the Wolfschmidt Kummel brand that has been brought back to life by WorldCamp and a few other shareholders, which I declare to be one. And it's coming to a store near you. So finally, given your sports skill and enthusiasm. I've been oversold, but yeah. You can only have two tickets, Roland Garros next year, World Cup football final or the Olympics. Yes.

Oh, I think the Olympics. I mean, I would take any of those if anybody out there can't make it and has tickets. I mean, I love going to sports events and

But the Olympics has been a very important part of our family life. I mean, all these sports, I mean, we're very lucky. Our kids love watching sports. I mean, funny enough, it's almost as good a question, Simon, which is what's the best invention of the last 50 years? I'd put Sky Sports or Televise Sports right up there because, you know, it's a joy to watch people who are the best in the world giving everything. And we've been lucky enough to go to a few Olympics as a family group. And I love the fact that

The level of competition is not just with the Olympics. It's not just about winning or losing. The placing is important. Whereas in football and with tennis, there's always a winner and a loser, which is brutal. I mean, that's life, I suppose. But I've got a real soft spot for the Olympics. We did a great job here when it was in London. I went last year in Paris to loads of events, including the women's golf. We went to the water polo finals. You know, we were I was on the computer as soon as tickets were released and

And it was a real joy. So I think Olympics. I mean, God has blessed Trump. I mean, this is his words, by the way, not mine. When he said that maybe he thought twice that maybe he didn't win the election 2020 because now he gets to be president for a football World Cup in the US, for Olympics in the US, and for the 250th anniversary of United States independence. And as a kind of legacy moment to preside over, as though Trump didn't like the camera enough,

that puts him in a kind of amazing place to be able to get the tickets to everything you want. So that's one reason I'm jealous of Donald J. Trump. Well, we are going to close. I sometimes, you know, conclude, but I mean, I'd be, I'd be taking notes that were,

run to pages if I had to bring all these conclusions I'm just going to say it's been four years since you were on so nice to see you you make the world a better place by your writings, thinkings and sharing your thoughts so thank you for being here it's very generous, if it was a little bit later in the day I'd crack the martinis

Thanks for having me. Really great. So, Peter, we recorded our conversation only a few weeks ago. If a week is a long time in politics, certainly in your area of expertise, there's been a lot of change. So we wanted to come back and just do an update with regard to Iran. I think it's particularly important

particularly topical what's happened. And you have just been at the NATO summit at The Hague with President Trump. So you're extremely well placed. So let's just keep it a really simple opening question. How do you appraise Iranian related developments of the last decade?

week. We recorded before Israel had launched its attacks on Iran. I mean, last September 2024, Israel had basically wiped most of Iran's air defences out of action. And so there was a kind of obvious window of opportunity where the military in Israel had been planning for this for years. I think in the expectation that they might have one or two shots at different bits and pieces, as it happened,

As the kind of nuclear talks kept on going between Trump and Iran, as we spoke about, it looked to me that it was a chance, a reasonable chance of a breakthrough. They were due to meet in Oman for the sixth round of talks. And I think that all the military plans then got pushed forward by Israel to say if an agreement got made with the US and Iran, that would take away any opportunity that Israel would ever have. So that window was closing.

So the attacks took out all of what was left of Iran's defenses. The embedding of Mossad and Israel's security services, military intelligence was absolutely critical so that they knew where everybody was at all times. So that has given operational superiority that allowed over the course of the following 12 days, Israel to knock down every single thing it thought it could do, except for hitting Iran.

the three big installations at Fordow, at Isfahan and at Natanz. There's been a lot of discussion about how bad the damage was. I think the fact that Trump was willing to use force and to put B2s in the sky

and hit Iran has shown that he is not perhaps always chickening out, as everybody's been saying, but he understands what you do when you've got a counterparty who is defenceless. So Iran then put missiles back into the sky over Doha in a pre-coordinated attack to sort of show that it needed to do something back in return. But Iran has been

teetering at the knees. So now Israel's probably achieved all it needs to. We're at the delta where there's not much point in going even deeper into Iran sort of society and senior figures. It's what's a new deal look like? And all those moving parts, because it's 3D chess, the bits I've been following, paying attention to, and this might all change in the few days before this comes out, is Trump saying it's okay for China to buy Iranian oil.

And there's a bigger three-dimensional chess game going on where Russia's part of the equation, India's part of the equation, China's part of the equation.

And what now needs to be done is a delicate threading of the needle that gives Iran an off ramp, but allows for de-escalation, not just of nuclear, but allows perhaps some of those more bigger reforms that people be looking for in Iran, that those might come forward too. But my guess would be that, in fact, Iran will now go through a period of repression of looking for dissidents, trying to iron out the kind of loose dissidents.

stones in the wall that allowed so many of their movements of the scientists and the military to be known. It's very much a position in flux, but the US use of force is absolutely critical. So there are always quantum leaps of conclusion from many so-called experts. But there has been this groundswell of opposition to this ageing theocracy in Iran for some time. Do you think that this might stop

stir up those Iranians of whom there appear to be many who are cross at this regime, pursuing the sort of the ideological dogma they've had about the destruction of Israel and that the nuclear status had to be the sort of, you know, the golden, golden ambition.

Look, the Iranian world is very young, median age, very tech savvy, lots of ways of getting around past through VPNs to understand what's going on in the world. I think there's been a lot of discussion, a lot of fear, obviously. But, you know, I think there are lots of voices that are saying,

that just because the Iranian regime is repressive and difficult, that actually being knocked out like this by Israel or by the US is, you know, it's shameful that Iran is in this position. So the idea that maybe should be that Iran does need a bomb, the idea that Iran does need better military forces.

is something that I find a lot of support. Having said that, you know, don't underestimate if you have full control of state media and of basically digital connections, you can both influence public opinion but also monitor what's going on. So, I mean, in fact, one of the discussions about the network world are when there were revolts in 2022, 2023, about whether women should have to cover their hair after dissidents were put in prison and killed. When you find protests happening,

If you're a surveillance state, it's quite useful to know where those pockets of opposition are. So I think it's a split world. There's lots of social media activity in Iran as the bombings are going on, saying if Iran had spent more time thinking about its defence rather than persecuting women, then maybe they'd have had a better chance of standing up to Israel. But being kneecapped and humiliated by one of your neighbours who you've been told is the great Satan is also suboptimal.

for young people as well. So, you know, lots of people have been predicting the rise of a rebellion that would overthrow the regime. But, you know, probably slow reform probably is better than revolution. But let's see. And how do you weigh up? I mean, the assertions that came out of the administration very quickly were of the unquestionable success. And then we get this leaked report followed by so much discrediting by Trump that you think the sort of, you know, the man protested too much.

Does it matter if, in fact, we discover in the next few months that it wasn't such an impressive bunker-busting expedition? I think not really. I mean, you know, over the coming months and years to rebuild, like we all know, it's just a question of time, leadership and money. But there are plenty of, maybe not friends of Iran, but plenty of other states around the world who think that two nuclear states...

launching a first preemptive action against Iran, claiming it to be self-defense, that that's not what international law should look like. So Iran will find lots of corners where it'll find sympathy. I mean, what's interesting is that China and Russia both issued statements condemning the violence, but didn't offer meaningful support, logistics or otherwise. But I think it's a changing world. I think any state in the world right now is worried that

they may be next on the menu. And you have lots of voices in the Asian world that we spoke about when we recorded it. How they see the West, rightly or wrongly, and possibly rightly, is that we are very keen to shoot first and ask questions second. And that the interventions when you tot up Iran now, Iraq, Afghanistan, the ways in which we try to reshape the world in the order that suits us, you know, that we are, that is in a state of change. So Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, gave

get with his confirmation hearings, he said the post-World War II order is not only obsolete, but it's used as a weapon against the United States. So that forging of a new world order means lots of different things to lots of different people. And we shouldn't kid ourselves in the West that we're just trying to keep the rules of the club and of the game in our favor. You know, those are all, I think, ways in which people are going to sit up and work out

what do they want and need. But the model of Iran, the message of Iran is, if you want to be independent, have a nuclear bomb because people don't attack you. If you look like you nearly have a nuclear bomb, then you're in trouble. So the final question I have to ask, since I found myself in heated debate with my son, was about the end justifying the means. How, as a historian, do you think we will reflect on US intervention? It all depends what happens in the coming weeks and months.

You know, turning points are very easy to pick out, you know, in real time. And in fact, they don't turn into much. The bit that I'm worried about is always about what happens on the periphery, the kind of black swan events, you know, like Sarajevo in 1914, where two weeks beforehand, one of the senior British diplomats had said he'd never seen the waters of Europe so calm.

And then Austrian Archduke gets shot by a totally random person, you know, by a Serbian nationalist. And then the seismic shocks that lead to the Russian Revolution, collapse of empires, you name it. I think that those are the things I'm paying a lot of attention to of a sudden bump in the road. At the moment, we're talking markets have all given, they've all recovered. They're within 1% of their highest ever marks. The markets didn't react at all to what's happened yet.

And so we all think that it's business as usual, but some of those undercurrents I think are much more severe and serious than we're pricing in. So it's what might go wrong that suddenly throws things off is what I think we should be thinking about.

Well, I really appreciate you coming back for that top up and sharing those thoughts. And two questions I didn't ask you outside of this, which I'm going to now ask you, which is lots of would-be aspiring authors and writers will have enjoyed watching and listening to you in the whole episode. What advice would you give to a young person who thinks that they might have a future which involves writing?

Get on with it. You know, write. Lots of people, lots of authors have an idea up their sleeve. You know, put it on the page. Don't worry about it. I think that that's the first thing. And sometimes the academic world, you know, my horror when I was a graduate student was that the people who were the cleverest had never written their magnum opus. You know, they were always waiting for it to be perfect because I guess they were worried that it would be, you know, how it would be judged or reviewed. But just, I think, get on with it and give it a go.

And also podcasts, podcasts, podcasts. Nothing wrong with those, Simon. You know, the way of communicating complex ideas in a way that's interesting, digestible and, you know, not everybody's got time on their hands. So finding different ways to communicate. Maybe it's maybe writing books goes alongside being able to give lectures and come on podcasts and talk about their ideas.

And just as a reminder to our audience, in fact, your own podcast is terrific. And I hate to get people drawn away from the Money Maze podcast, but it is. Money Maze is the only show in town. Everybody knows that. They wouldn't have got to this part of the podcast to hear that. So, yeah, keep listening. Don't say anything else. OK, so the final, final question is, is there a summit for Peter Frankopan still to scale?

Yeah, there's the Money Maze conference coming up in end of September that I've been tentatively lined up and I've seen my name in pencil. In fact, I've even seen my name in ink. So I'm hoping that that's not just you being polite to me, but that's the next feather in my cap. Well, fantastic. You've done our PR. We're going to let you go. Pinar, thank you once more. Thanks a lot.

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