Trump edition: ‘This is Trump unleashed and unfiltered’
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Because we hear it's bad luck to be hungry on game day. So download the Instacart app today and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days excludes restaurants. Trump is a man in a hurry trying to do all those things he's wanted to do for 40 years. So this is Trump unleashed. This is Trump without filters.

We'll 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 Venetia Rainey, and this is Battle Lines, Trump edition. It's Friday, 18th of April, 2025.

Is the UK about to strike a trade deal with the US? And what concessions would that involve? On today's episode, I'll be digging into what a deal might look like and whether it's even a good idea with Sir Kim Darroch, Britain's ambassador to the US during the first Trump administration. We'll also be talking about why we need a new Iran nuclear deal, how NATO can survive the US's shift in priorities, and why Trump loves Churchill. Kim joined the Foreign Office in 1976 and had his first posting in Tokyo.

He later served as the UK's permanent representative to the EU before being appointed David Cameron's National Security Advisor from 2012 to 2015, covering ISIS, Ukraine, Iran and Libya.

In 2016, Kim became the UK's ambassador to the US, a role he held until 2019 when confidential diplomatic cables were leaked in which he called Trump "inept, insecure and incompetent." Trump responded by calling Kim "a stupid guy" who was not liked or well thought of within the US and sealed his fate by saying he would "no longer deal with him." Kim resigned shortly afterwards. In 2020, he wrote "Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump."

He is now Lord Kim and sits on the International Relations and Defence Committee, where he has just started working on a new inquiry into the future of UK-US relations. So he's the perfect person to be joining us at this tricky time. Kim, welcome to Battlelines.

Let's start with Trump's trade war. The Telegraph revealed this week that White House officials believe a trade deal with Britain could be finalised within three weeks. Obviously, there were high hopes at the beginning that Starmer's friendly relationship with Trump might lead to the UK being exempted from his original blitz of tariffs. That's not the case.

That didn't happen, and at the beginning of this month the UK was slapped with that baseline 10% tariff, along with higher rates for cars, steel and aluminium. Those remained in place even after Trump's surprise 90-day pause on higher tariffs about a week later, and there have been plenty of frantic negotiations since then.

But on top of the Telegraph's reporting, earlier this week we heard some positive sounds from Vice President J.D. Vance. He told British news website Unheard that the President really loves the United Kingdom. He loves the King and there's a good chance that will come to a great agreement that's in the best interest of both countries. Kim, does that make you hopeful? Not entirely, to be honest. First of all, let's just remember there is no justification at all for the tariffs on the UK.

Trump says that the tariffs are about correcting long-standing, very big trade imbalances. Well, according to American figures, they actually have a trade surplus with us. So one has to ask just what is the reason why we should be experiencing any tariffs at all, given that the Americans sell more to us than we do to them? Is that including services? I think that's including services as well, but certainly in goods. And that's what their own figures say, by the way.

Second, let's remember that although there was some celebration in the UK that we were only at the baseline of 10%, whereas others were at rather higher rates, our biggest export to the US pretty much, 20% of our total exports to the US in goods are cars, and that's a 25%. We export steel there, that's a 25%. So actually, the total tariff here is really quite substantial. Now, I saw what JD Vance said earlier.

And obviously, it would be great if we got a good, fair trade deal under which these tariffs were abolished. I would be as pleased as anyone in this country if that would happen. Why am I skeptical? First of all, whatever the positive noise is coming from the vice president, we've been negotiating this deal for a while now.

And it's not yet happened. So there must be something in there that is quite difficult or contentious that is holding things up. Otherwise, why wouldn't we have done it? After all, the British government is saying it's basically mostly about digital services and AI and all the rest of it, which you would think would be fairly straightforward. Second...

There are rumors, including in your esteemed newspaper, about what the American demands might be, whether it would be the abolition or reduction of digital tax, whether it would be the online safety bill they want removed from the statute book, whether it would be about our relations with the European Union and this reset.

and whether it would be about our regulatory alignment. So all of those, if they are indeed on the American wish list, and I don't know, and none of us know for sure until we get something on the record from one or other government, I think that's going to be very difficult for the Starmer government because they desperately need growth,

One of the keys to growth would be to remove some of the barriers in trade with the European Union. This is not about reversing Brexit, it's just about taking away some of the barriers that have built up since we left the European Union.

And, you know, if we can't do that, then, you know, where is the growth going to come from? Very last point. Question in my mind also is, and this has never been set out, what would we get as a result of the trade deal? Would everything be abolished? Or would, as is sometimes suggested, the 10% baseline tariffs stay? What about these very damaging tariffs on exports of British cars?

and so on. So does everything go or does just the 10% tariff go? Or what is it that would be the reward for doing a trade deal? So that's why I think this is much too early to start hanging out the bunting and thinking that we are about to exit from this really damaging trade crisis. You've mentioned a few of the possible concessions there, like the online safety bill. I know you've also spoken about taxes on tech giants, agriculture. Can you just explain

what exactly those concessions would involve and which you think would be most likely if there was to be a trade deal? It's clear that one of the differences, Venetia, between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 is in this first term, his relations with the tech giants down in California were edgy at best.

They now feel and look rather transformed. And you saw Elon Musk obviously gave a great deal to the Trump campaign. And then Zuckerberg and others came along to the inauguration, reputially gave many millions to the inauguration fund. It's a very different looking relationship. They won't be doing it just because they've had a road to Damascus moment about the desirability of a Trump second presidency.

They will also expect some payback for showing this public support. And they won't like over there either the online safety bill or the digital services tax. So it wouldn't surprise me, therefore, if under pressure from Silicon Valley, this was one of the American demands.

And it's 800 million, I'm told, worth of money to UK Exchequer. Very badly needed. So it would be a hit to us, although arguably a smaller hit than the tariffs, if that went. There's also a kind of philosophical issue about should America really decide what our tax policy is? And I have a problem with that.

Next area, look on agriculture. It has been a longstanding objective or success of American administrations, nothing unique about current administrations opposition to them, to get much better access, much fuller access for US agriculture to the European market as a whole. And, you know, the UK market is a big part of the European market.

So I remember in the first term of Trump, when we tried to negotiate or started to negotiate a UK-US free trade deal, I think the top of the American demands at that stage was free access to US agriculture. It always was also in talks when we were in the EU on EU-US trade deals. And so it would be a departure from the norm if that wasn't on the American wish list this time round.

And why is the problem? Well, UK farming industry has much higher welfare standards. Some of the procedures like pouring washed chicken, home and treated people, the rest, everyone knows about this, are outlawed in the UK. But the other broader issue is the scale of production over there brings very low costs, which would mean that if you did have a open access to US agriculture, it would greatly undercut our domestic products. Now,

Nice for consumers, you might say, but do we want a farming industry in this country or not? Because you could do a great deal of damage to free access if US goods was allowed. And then...

Final point, you will find some of the economists in the Trump circle, literally a guy called Stephen Moore, who's on the British media quite often, saying that a strategic objective for the Republicans in America is to draw the UK out of the EU regulatory framework and into theirs. And so a more general demand that we detach ourselves from EU regulation is

and align ourselves much more with US regulation seems to be possible. Can we just dig into that a little bit more? Starmer's repeatedly said that we don't need to choose between the US and the EU, but I know you've made comments recently suggesting that it would be a much easier win for the UK in terms of finding more growth if we reduce some of those trade barriers with the EU.

How important is a deal with the US in the bigger picture? Or do you think it's something that we should be dropping in favour of chasing, as you mentioned, more alignment with the EU? The starting point here is that although the US is a big trading partner, the EU is more than twice as big, more than 40% of our exports go to the EU. So there's a simple sort of economic and commercial interest there. Look, in an ideal world,

we would have free trade with as many countries as possible around the world. We'd have the best possible free trade regime with the EU. We'd have a free trade regime with the US that was mutually beneficial. We'd have one with India. We have already this specific free trade group that we are engaged with. The more, the better, if you believe in free trade as I do. So I understand what the government should say.

We don't want to choose between, no, we want as much free trade around the world as possible. And that's exactly the right objective. But when it comes to regulation, you do have to, in a sense, make a choice. What's going to be on our statute? Is it mostly the ones we were used to with the EU that we played a part in designing to stay aligned with the EU as our biggest export market?

Or do you shift to the US and hope that over time, you get up from 20% to more like 40%? I think that's a very ambitious objective. I think it would take a long time to achieve that. So in terms of common sense at the moment, I think it's in the interests of British commerce that we basically stick inside the EU framework. One country that Trump hasn't dropped tariffs on, obviously, is China. In fact, they've been hiked a few times and they're now at 145% at the time of recording.

Chinese President Xi Jinping this week accused Trump of unilateral bullying. Do you agree with that? Chinese can look after themselves. They're the world's second biggest economy. They have aspirations to be the biggest by 2050. You might call some of the things Americans are doing to much smaller countries around the world bullying, but I wouldn't use that word in the context of China. Chinese can look after themselves. And by the way, the Chinese government

are notorious for unfair trade practices, whether it's tariffs or it's all the non-tariff barriers or it's all the state support for large sectors of Chinese industry and business. So I have no sympathy for the Chinese being singled out by the Americans in these sectors. However, it is bad for international trade in general,

for the world's two biggest economic powers to have essentially stopped trading with one lower. Because once you have 125% US tariffs on Chinese goods and something like 85% tariffs on US goods, that's pretty much going to close down trade. And that will damage all of us.

So, setting aside Chinese accusations of bullying or whatever, it would be good for all of us if they could reach some sort of deal, provided it's not some exclusive deal that damages the rest of us. There's been a lot of talk about fears that China might start dumping its goods in other markets, such as the UK, if it's not able to sell them in the US. Do you think the UK should be imposing some sort of tariff to stop that from happening, particularly with, for example, steel?

I wouldn't do it preemptively, Venetia, but I would certainly watch this very, very closely and be ready to do something very quickly if that happened, because I think that's an entirely credible, somewhat even say likely consequence if this Chinese-American trade war continues.

And it might well continue, by the way. In the first term, it lasted basically two and a half years plus, and it was never properly resolved by the end of the first Trump presidency. And I think something in the end, like close to $400 billion worth of trade was involved. If you counted Chinese tariffs on the US and US tariffs on China. So these things can drag on and on. And while Trump has suspended tariffs for 90 days on the rest of us,

There will be a big, big ask to do 60-odd trade deals in 90 days. The war with China is continuing pretty much unabated, though he has lifted tariffs on certain goods like iPhones. This is potentially very damaging long-term for all of us.

Are you getting a massive sense of deja vu with this new China trade war? Obviously, as you mentioned, there was one during the first Trump administration as well. Or does it feel different this time around, more intentional, more planned? It feels different this time around. And here's why. In his first term, to be honest, I don't think he expected to win.

and certainly the polls didn't say he was going to win. His campaign figures, people like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, were, to be frank, rather fringe figures in the Republican Party. All the big names have been sapped off by other candidates like Ted Cruz.

And so he had basically a very unprepared team when he came into government. He compensated for that by appointing a number of people recommended to him by the mainstream Republican establishment. People like Jim Mattis, the much decorated General Defense Secretary, or Rex Tilleman, who was the Secretary of State, or a number of the figures in the White House, like Reitz Priebus, his first chief of staff. Over the course of the next two years,

They all, in one way or another, fell out with President Trump and they all got fired. But while they were in the White House, they acted, I think, as guardrails and as constraints on Trump and limited quite a lot of what he wanted to do. Then in the second half of his first term, he had lost his majority in Congress and COVID hit, which was a huge distraction.

So what you had by the end of the first four years of Donald Trump, he hadn't achieved a lot of the things he wanted to do, hadn't even tried on some of the things he wanted to do. What you're seeing now, the second term, is a Trump who has a popular majority, didn't have that in the first term. He has both houses of Congress. He has a Republican majority on the Supreme Court.

He has a united team behind him. He's got four years of planning for this second term behind him and an agenda he wants to deliver. The Democrats, it feels over here, more or less banished from the political scene at the moment. And Trump is a man in a hurry trying to do all those things he's wanted to do for 40 years with the tariff regime as the top of the list. So this is Trump unleashed.

This is Trump without filters. Trump has said that this row back on tariffs and this separate bucket or exemptions, depending on how you describe it, for smartphones and computers, he says that all of this was planned. And you would have thought, given that, as you mentioned, he had four years to game out this whole tariff assault, that that would be true. Yet it doesn't feel planned. What's your take on that? To say the least, it doesn't feel planned. Look, I think it's ridiculous to say this because it's all part of some master plan.

a loss of 5 trillion in the American stock market was all part of some master plan, or that the chaos on the bond market and the price of financing the US debt mountain escalating as it did. When I saw those reports, I think it was last Wednesday morning, that there was real trouble and chaos in the bond market and that US debt was going to become much more expensive to finance. I thought this is real trouble.

And within 12 hours, he'd introduced the 90-day pause. So it's that famous old James Carville saying, nothing can intimidate like the bond market. And I do think, Patricia, that those who are now going to try and negotiate trade deals with the Trump administration will have all this in mind, because I don't think he can ever go back to that tariff regime he introduced a couple of weeks back

with a 10% tariff on everyone and then much higher tariffs on a lot of key trading partners. I don't think he can go back there. So I think he's in a weaker position doing trade deals now than he was before the climb down, before the 90-day pause, and before all of the chaos. So it's a really historic moment what happened when he did that pause because of what's happening in the financial markets. And I think historians will look at it in future and

It's not quite like Black Wednesday, but it certainly is a bit like what brought down this trust's budget, I think. In that sort of area, you know, you cannot stand up to the bond markets when they take it against you. Kim, in terms of this UK trade deal, what role would the current British ambassador to the US, obviously Peter Mandelson, what role would he be playing in all of this?

Peter Manelson will be, I'm sure, talking to a lot of people around the administration, whether in the White House or in the Department of Commerce, or Scott Besant is an increasingly prominent figure in the Trump administration, the Treasury Secretary, talking to him and his team. And we'll be thinking, I'm sure, about little else than trying to get the best possible deal for the UK.

But the embassy will do a lot of this, but there will be direct negotiations also run from Whitehall, run from the Department of Trade and Business, and I promise you Number 10 will be taking an hour-to-hour interest in how things are going. So it's a whole government affair, but there's no question that the embassy in Washington will have a pivotal role, both in backing up what Whitehall is doing

expressing foreign negotiations, but also in monitoring US reactions and US thinking. We haven't heard much about Mandelson since he took up his post. How do you think he's doing so far? We heard much more about Mandelson before he was appointed than once he got there.

Now that he's there, there's comparative silence. I think on the whole, that's a good sign, Nisha. I think that Starmer's first visit to Washington, his first meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, everything I read about it seemed to go pretty well.

And I think Peter Mendelsohn can claim some credit for that. He was only there a few weeks beforehand, but he will have been around town. He will have been talking to the White House about what kind of visits should be managed. And he's delivered there. And we were saying beforehand that that was his first big test, and he passed it. Next big test is how we come out on this trade deal. Let's see. Let's see. I mean, I am as fascinated as everyone. I hope we get the best possible deal.

But I'm fascinated to see how this unfolds. And if it is a very good deal, very fair deal, he will be able to claim some credit for it. Is there any advice that you'd give him based on your previous experiences over there? I think he's a very smart politician. He doesn't need advice from people like me. But

The obvious point to make here is that Washington is a bubble. It's actually a very Democrat town, which I think voted more than 90% for Democrats in recent elections. Talking to people around Washington will not give you a picture of how people around the country feel about how the Trump administration is doing, because there are a lot of people who are very generically very critical of Donald Trump in town. The other thing I would say is,

Of course, the people in the White House, the staffers, people in the cabinet, the ministers, the advisers, people really need to have good relations with them, to be talking to them pretty much daily about what's going on, because obviously they talk to the president. But they're not the only ones who talk to the president. There's always been, with Donald Trump, a circle of friends,

almost exclusively billionaire businessman whom he phones regularly, some of them every week, some of them more often than that,

And he will say to them, how am I doing? What do you think about this? What do you think about that? And they have a lot of influence over him. Some would say because he feels as successful businessmen, they're like him and he really respects their views. And if they tell him, this is a bad idea, Donald, or this is what you should do, or you need to do deals as quickly as possible to get past this whole tariff crisis, that's

he will listen to that. So if as British ambassador, you can get to some of those people and have a dialogue with them, you're talking to people who have as much, if not more influence over Donald Trump as people in the White House and in the administration. Is there anyone in particular that you're thinking of for this administration beyond those we've mentioned, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk? Trump's businesses in his career have basically been around real estate. He buys and sells real

hotels and golf courses and casinos. I remember going to some of the inauguration parties in his first term, and they were paid for.

And the main guests were people from that area of business. I don't want to name names, but these are people who are well known in America for having been successful in the same business areas as Donald Trump. And so it's easy to pick them out. It's hard, obviously, to get through to them. Coming up after the break, Kim gives his take on the future of the special relationship and how NATO can survive Trump.

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Welcome back. Kim, you're currently working on a committee that's looking at the prospects for the US-UK relationship. How do you assess it more broadly? We're obviously in a very turbulent period and we'll come on to that a little bit more, but I'm just thinking of that bigger picture. Well, initially, it's very early days because we've only just started interviewing in public session some of the experts who would expect us to talk to about the prospects for relations.

So we've interviewed some of the main commentators in this area. We've interviewed a representative of Republicans abroad. We invited a Democrat equivalent, but they couldn't make it. They had to come and see us. We've interviewed academics who specialize in the United States. So we're gathering information at this stage.

there's no question but that there have been some dramatic shifts. The tectonic plates are shifting since Donald Trump started his second term. And the big question is, are these shifts lasting? Are they going to define the American positioning for decades to come? Or are they something that will last four years and then get reversed? If you remember the handover from

Trump won to Biden, it did seem like suddenly everything went back to normal. Now, I think it's going to be different this time. And I think some of the changes that Donald Trump is bringing about and some of the attitudes that he represents will last beyond him, even if the Republicans don't win the next presidency.

And I think the reality of it is that for generations, America has been saying Europe needs to do more to defend itself. Can't just rely on America forever. But it's real now. It really is real. And I expect over the course of these four years, further American disengagement from Europe and further refocusing on the Asian theater.

And it's now the onus is on us Europeans to spend a great deal more on defense, not only a couple of minor percentage points more. Everyone needs to go up to about 3%. And we need to be prepared to look after ourselves in this new world and not to rely on the American security umbrella. And that's a big, big challenge.

all of us, and in a way, a more strategic challenge than this whole tariffs thing, which one way or another, I think, will get sorted out over the next year or two. Our collective national security in this part of the world now needs a fundamental new effort and reappraisal. One of the biggest symbols, as well as a concrete example of that cross-Atlantic relationship in terms of security architecture is obviously NATO. Do you think NATO will survive Trump? I do, but it's going to be a...

a NATO in which the Europeans are going to have to play a bigger part. One of the reasons I say that is that the national security consensus in America on both sides of the political aisle is that the strategic challenge for the 21st century is China.

And so whoever is in the White House, there is going to be some repositioning and realignment of American efforts, strategic security efforts towards Asia, towards China. And NATO will survive, I think. I mean, Trump is not, frankly, a great fan of NATO.

but it would need Senate approval for the US to withdraw from NATO. I don't think that's ever going to happen. But America will not be as big and as dominant a force in NATO in the future as it has been in Boston. Europe just has to respond to that. There's a trend in the US that I want to ask you about, and bear with me because this might feel like quite a small example, but I do think it taps into something bigger about the shifts and the rift that's opening up between the US and the UK.

And that's the trashing of Winston Churchill. It was previously a bit of a fringe view espoused by people like Pat Buchanan. They basically said that Churchill perpetuated the Second World War when he could have just made a deal with Hitler and it all would have been fine. But recently, we've started to hear those views being parroted by people like Tucker Carlson, obviously part of Trump's circle, and also being given airtime on Joe Rogan's podcast, which is one of the most widely listened to podcasts in the U.S.,

And I think we can see similarities between those views and how the current US administration seems to be approaching the Ukraine war. Ukraine is the one clinging onto the conflict when they could just make a deal with Putin, despite Russia being the belligerent. It's this idea of spheres of influence coming back into fashion and no sense of the importance of fighting for democracy for democracy's sake, self-determination, Western values, which I think in the UK we still very strongly believe in, but seems to be of less importance for whatever reason now in the US. Right.

What do you make of that shift and how can the UK deal with that? Well, I think your analysis and your description there is a good one. I haven't picked up on the Churchill thing until I read something a couple of days ago

And it fascinated me, but just on Churchill, let me just say, whatever is going on on the rightward fringes of American political thinking, the Republican Party or maybe beyond the Republican Party on Churchill, I don't think it's shared by Donald Trump. One of his favorite films we heard during his first term, one that he told everyone in the White House to go and see was The Darkest Hour, which won those Oscars.

I remember we took him on his first visit to the UK, not the state visit, the first one. We took him to Blenheim and he was shown around some of the artifacts there reflecting Churchill's birthplace. And he was absolutely fascinated by it. And he's moved the Churchill bust back into the Oval Office.

So I don't have any worries about Donald Trump's views on Churchill, but you're right about some of the stuff that is going on on the right-wing streams. And on these kind of things, Donald Trump looks like a moderate rather than, as some say, this populist far-right figure. But on Ukraine...

You know, I have some concerns on Ukraine because it did look initially as if the Trump administration was pursuing a peace deal that would have looked a bit like a capitulation, which Ukraine gave up all its territory to Russia, that they promised never to join NATO. They even promised to demilitarize in exchange just for a ceasefire. As things have developed, it hasn't worked out quite like that. And actually,

I mean, those of us who are skeptics about the Ukraine deal being deliverable at this stage, I think, have found some evidence for our view. Because actually, it's Putin who is refusing to sign up to a ceasefire negotiations at the moment, causing some rift with the Trump administration.

and the threat of further sanctions against it. Now, I don't think sanctions are going to bring down the Russian regime. They've got masses of sanctions on them already, and they are applying on nevertheless. On the one hand, it doesn't look like a ceasefire on Ukraine is going to come quickly,

On the other hand, the American positioning now seems to be much more at odds with the Russian position than with the Ukrainian position. And when you think where we were with that row in the White House in front of the TV cameras a few weeks back, that's a really big shift and one that...

probably is a good thing. Do you think Starmer's handled it well? And do you think it's a good idea to press on with this coalition of the willing, despite it not being particularly viable without the US? I think it's not any more high on the agenda in terms of where we are on Ukraine. It's not the central issue. And it may look a bit irrelevant if the Russians aren't even interested in a ceasefire. But I think that

He showed some political courage in taking the lead amongst European countries and supporting the concept. Alongside Macron, he got a sort of leadership role in trying to pull something together. We don't know if that work will be relevant in the future or not.

But if it is, then he deserves some credit for having initiated it and helped to pull things together. Honestly, the question of whether there will ever need to be a reassurance force in Ukraine will without America, I think is a big, big question now. There's one other foreign policy aspect that I want to ask you about, and that's Trump's attempts to strike a deal with Iran.

There's been a lot of back and forth about what sort of conditions they might impose. They want them to disarm completely, a Libya-style deal or some kind of return essentially to the JCPOA that fell apart after Trump pulled out in 2018. What do you think they're likely to get, if anything?

When Trump took America out of the JCPOA during his first term, we Europeans all lobbied very hard against that, and we failed. And it felt like a huge disaster when it happened. And the fact is that since then, the Iranians have got much closer to the threshold of having a nuclear weapon which they could actually deploy. Can I just interrupt you there? Why did you fail? What was it that

had Trump so convinced that it was a terrible deal and he needed to pull out? What were the arguments going into his ear? He had been saying this throughout his campaign trial, it's a terrible deal. So it was one of the big division points between him and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. And one of the big criticisms we had of the Obama deal, he hated the fact that Iranians had basically been paid to do the deal. And there were all these allegations about trailer loads of money being flown over to Iran.

And he argued the deal was inadequate because it didn't constrain the Iranian efforts to develop a ballistic missile capability. So he had some criticisms of it. Those of us who negotiated it, I was National Security Advisor at the time, never said it was a perfect deal.

We said it was the best that could be negotiated at the time. And it did involve hundreds of IAEA inspections on Iranian nuclear sites. So we were very confident the Iranians had indeed mothballed their program. So we thought it was a better place to be than what happened when the U.S. pulled out of the deal and the deal basically fell apart.

Fascinatingly, what you're now seeing is Trump going back into trying to negotiate something with the Iranians. It's accompanied by some quite sort of heavy threats about strike capability should this deal not be done.

But he is after something that he thinks would be better than and more comprehensive than the JCPOA. Well, good luck to him. And look, if he can get that deal, that would be great for all of us because the Iranian nuclear program is a bigger threat in a way to Europe than it is to the US. But I would be interested if in the end,

He settles for something that's quite like the JCPOA, because that is the best that we can negotiate at the moment. And I would say to him, whatever happened in the past, you know, no recriminations. If you do a deal, even if it looks like the JCPOA, that's better than not having one. Is that the most likely outcome of all of this, do you think? Or do you think we're heading towards a strike even on Iran's nuclear facilities, which we know is something that elements in the Israeli government are keen on?

I think it's on the edge at the moment. I just don't know. I don't know enough about the makeup and the views of the Iranian regime to know how likely it is. It looks a bit moderate than it did a couple of years ago because of

who's been elected president and that kind of thing, but I just don't know. You've mentioned a few comparison points between Trump 1 and Trump 2. I'd be interested to hear any other reflections that you've got on that. What you had in Trump 1, which was entertaining for all of us watching it closely, was because they didn't know each other and they came from different wings of the Republican Party, a very divided administration. The White House individuals

leaked against each other incessantly in the first year or two of Trump's first term. So the Washington Post, I remember, specialised in these stories.

They would say they had a dozen unattributable sources for some of them. So much leaking was going on. The running joke, Venetia, was that Washington Post were getting so many leaks that they had to set up a telephone answering system which said, if you want to leak against Reince Priebus, press 1. If you want to leak against Steve Bannon, press 2. Against Jared Kushner, press 3, and so on.

The team looks much united, more united this time, as so they should be, because after all, they've been working together and planning for, they've had four years to put this team together. There is much less leaking going on. What I do notice is some splits are starting to appear.

Peter Navarro, who is the architect of the tariffs policy, he was around in the first term, but was constrained by some of the mainstreamers in the White House. He's unconstrained this time, but already because of, I think, the damage to the stock market and the chaos in the bond market, his voice is being supplanted a bit by Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary, if what I read in the American media is right.

Then you have a row between Elon Musk and actually several people. Navarro, he's called Dumber Than a Sack of Bricks.

He had a row apparently with the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, over Musk's demands to reduce the size of the State Department. He's had a row with other bits of the machinery. So there's more splits appearing and a bit more leaking going on. So one of the things we'll just have to watch over Trump too is whether they can maintain the sort of unity they showed in the first couple of months.

or whether gradually more and more splits and dissent will appear. Aside from the leak that ended your posting, do you have any other reflections on your time as US ambassador? Do you wish you were doing it again now? Absolutely don't. Absolutely do not at all wish I was doing it now. But look, it was a fascinating period in history. And I'm just, in a way, it was a ringside seat on one of the most extraordinary periods in American politics.

And I hope all of those in the embassy now who will be working absolutely 24-7 on all the challenges they face, nevertheless, can take a moment to reflect on the extraordinary times they're living through. Kim Derrick, thank you for joining us on Battlelines. That's all for today's episode. We'll be back again on Monday with a special bank holiday edition looking at who would win a war in space. Until then, goodbye.

Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Venetia Rainey and Roland Oliphant. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it really helps others find the show.

To stay on top of all of our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can 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. The producer is Peter Shevlin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells.