In this episode, Faras Moudad joins me to talk about his journey into the field of Geopolitics. He is a geopolitical analyst for some of the world's biggest multinationals, helping them understand the risks associated with investing in the Middle East and North Africa.
00:04:45.560The thing is, right, the political narrative that goes around, which you say is completely divorced from reality,
00:04:52.980it appears that the politicians actually believe it.
00:04:57.480But they actually smoke their own gander.
00:04:59.280So when you're presenting this stuff to the C-suite of various corporations,
00:05:06.800are they sufficiently able to detach themselves from the narrative that they're getting every time they go home and turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper
00:05:14.440to the reports that you're giving them?
00:05:17.820Are they able to distinguish in their mind quite clearly the two?
00:05:54.960I mean, we don't know how much Tony Blair and co. knew about the Iraq war and about the weapons of mass destruction.
00:06:03.600We don't know how much they genuinely believed and how much they genuinely lied.
00:06:09.020There is an element of them believing their own shtick.
00:06:12.220I find that the local level personnel tend to have a good detailed knowledge of the ground.
00:06:19.200But even with them, you find the degree of idealism that is quite divorced from reality.
00:06:26.640So you will find embassy staff who are genuinely committed to democratizing Iraq or Syria or Lebanon or what have you.
00:06:36.880With that having no relevance to what actually goes on on the ground and how the country works.
00:06:43.080You also find them having very intimate knowledge of the various players and their loyalties.
00:06:48.300And one wonders at how much is there of cognitive dissonance and how much are they just deceiving themselves and lying outright to their audiences.
00:07:00.460Okay, so I can understand that the public needs to be sold a narrative.
00:07:08.180And it's probably, if you're sending troops over there, it's probably quite helpful if they fully believe it as well.
00:07:12.480Because it's much more convincing to send a young man out to fight for democracy than it is for, you know, we want oil contracts or whatever it is.
00:07:21.640Or we're in a geopolitical game with Iran or whatever the actual reality on the ground is.
00:07:26.280And I suppose you can excuse it in embassy staff and so on as long as they can do the dual trick in your mind that they're talking about the cognitive dissonance and actually get the point job done.
00:07:36.020But it starts to get extremely dangerous the higher up the chain you go if people actually believe the propaganda version of why something is being done as opposed to the real version.
00:07:48.300It's most dangerous in the context of Russia and China where you have senior politicians saying that the borders of Ukraine are inviolable, whereas they leave their own borders open.
00:08:01.300So it's not a question of the viability of borders.
00:08:06.200There it is clearly a question of imperial competition, which is fair.
00:08:14.440They're part of how we organize them ourselves.
00:08:17.920However, sometimes you need to be a little bit humble and accept that certain geopolitical problems like France or Russia are not going away.
00:08:28.040And that this is something that you have to live with and manage as opposed to solve.
00:08:33.800The problem is that in a democracy, telling people that the Russians are a problem that we have to manage doesn't really appeal to people.
00:08:43.420Whereas telling them either that the Russians are wonderful and we get along extremely well with them or that the Russians are all evil and they must be destroyed and stopped.
00:08:52.660That actually appeals to people emotionally.
00:08:56.200A big part of the problem that you're trying to put your finger on is that democracy is a highly emotional game.
00:09:05.020You really want to be extremely cold when you're thinking about strategy and politics.
00:09:12.620And getting emotion involved is inherently destructive.
00:09:16.440This is why the game of politics was always an elite game.
00:09:22.760With democracy, it's been transformed into a spectator sport.
00:09:32.900I mean, on Russia, if you look back to, say, the Second World War, we needed Russia and therefore Stalin was good old Uncle Joe.
00:09:39.900And he was built up as this sort of friendly, sort of uncle-like character.
00:09:46.560And then the moment we decided we wanted to turn against him, it flips the other way.
00:09:50.800And the public seemed to have no problem with this.
00:09:52.400The public could be moved around quite significantly.
00:09:55.500And we're obviously in a period at the moment where Russians are villainous.
00:09:58.720I mean, I remember when this Ukraine war started, you had people who were like,
00:10:02.480I think there was one Russian cellist or something that got thrown out of her apartment and a university simply on the grounds that she was Russian.
00:10:59.680Absent from their minds is the reality that the British Empire has been utterly destroyed, that Britain herself is being ravaged, that they have no geopolitical relevance.
00:11:09.440They tried to send one of the two aircraft carriers that they had to do something about the Houthi in Yemen, and they were unable to send the ship.
00:11:20.860The carriers that they paid for didn't actually work.
00:11:25.500So they're under the illusion that they're still in this competition, and they don't notice that now India is a completely autonomous player that's more focused on its own role containing China in partnership with Russia than it is on what the British want.
00:11:39.260So they suffer from this delusion of grandeur, and they believe that their role in the world is global and important, when in reality, to the extent that their role is global, it is as a cautionary tale.
00:11:55.740Yes, I had wondered that, because obviously the great game of the 1800s, where the British Empire tried to contain the various powers to the east, particularly Russia, keep Germany apart from Russia.
00:12:10.020Before agreeing to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which, if implemented in full, would have given the Russians Constantinople and the Straits, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles Straits, giving it access to the Mediterranean Sea and solving the perennial Russian problem of frozen ports.
00:12:29.620Oh, so we must come back to that, the Russian long game.
00:12:33.960But yes, so the great game played out for a long time, and Britain was good at it.
00:12:38.940And, I mean, it had a lot of resources and empire and so on.
00:12:41.360As you say, this has been gradually, and this for me has been, I'm glad you're saying it, the best explanation I can come up with for the severe Russia phobia that this country seems to have.
00:12:52.040It's that it made sense 150, 200 years ago, and that has passed down like a genetic memory through the organisations, despite the fact that everything else has changed.
00:13:32.480So, what this belligerence towards Russia allows them to do is to create a highly emotional narrative, which is always necessary in a democratic context, and use it as a distraction.
00:13:49.100The problem that they're facing is that things have gotten so bad that this kind of petty distraction is an irrelevance.
00:13:57.900So, they will yell at Farage or at whoever that, no, you're a Putin shill, you're a Russian agent, whatever it is.
00:14:06.520Mainly to distract from the fact that they have categorically failed in doing anything that would allow Britain to have genuine geopolitical influence.
00:14:16.720So, it's not just the memory, it's also the smokescreen.
00:14:24.700Who cares if the Russians of Odessa or Kharkiv or even Kiev are under Russian rule or under Ukrainian rule?
00:14:37.160Whereas the price of your house, the degraded services, the problem with migration, the problem with multiculturalism, the safety of your family, these are of immediate concern.
00:14:50.580But if you were to speak to them, if you were to speak about these issues in the same emotional language that they use about Putin, the reaction from the public would be severe because they would understand the extent of the betrayal.
00:15:06.960So, it's important for British leaders to stay stuck on this narrative because the alternative narratives are horrific.
00:15:18.280Now, for the Europeans, it varies a little bit.
00:15:24.160For the Poles, there is an immediate threat.
00:15:27.520If Ukraine collapses, then there is a real risk that the Baltic states would be next and then the Poles would be on the border with Russia.
00:15:36.800And that would mean that they have to spend massive amounts on their military and that would mean that they're vulnerable to the same problem that the Poles have always had, which is simultaneous pressure from the Germans and from the Russians.
00:16:03.440Except that the current German leadership is fully bought into the cult of wokeness with everything that that entails, from green energy to collective guilt of the Germans replacing original sin to the whole mess around sexuality and transgenderism, basically making gender identity into a substitute for having a soul.
00:16:29.920You have something within you that is eternal, that is not seen, that is different from your physical being, except that it's not a soul from God.
00:20:51.440Therefore, they must have conscription.
00:20:54.320They can't build a volunteer army because the kind of people who would volunteer to fight for Britain
00:21:02.120are the kinds of people that they would call far right.
00:21:05.600So they have a fundamental ideological problem.
00:21:07.460Except I think they've pushed them away as well.
00:21:09.720Because they have been so clear that anybody who they call far right, which would be basically somebody like me,
00:21:19.160they've been so clear that we are not part of the club.
00:21:24.320And that we know that if we're gone, all that happened is tens of thousands more boat people will turn up and be praying around our families while we're gone.
00:21:34.580At this point, I would just say, no, put me in prison if you must, but I'm not going.
00:22:54.460I've always said the base layer of any economy is energy and agriculture, because if you've got those two, then you can do anything else.
00:23:02.340If you've got cheap food and cheap energy, everything else is solved.
00:23:05.420Which makes Germany, as you were saying, all the more baffling, because they went all in on cheap Russian energy.
00:23:12.080They built an economy that was a four trillion euro economy based on $50 billion of cheap Russian gas.
00:23:19.340They closed down their nuclear power stations, were totally committed to this, then switched that off, then watched the Americans bomb their energy infrastructure and said not a damn thing about it.
00:23:33.460But no, I will just pull you back on the, so how likely is it that my audience is going to get conscripted and sent off to the Ukraine?
00:23:42.920The government will be overthrown before that happens.
00:23:46.220If they try to sort of force people to go and fight for Ukraine...
00:23:50.720Do you think they're actually mad enough to try?
00:23:53.320Look, the guys in the military think in a very different way from the politicians.
00:24:00.640They will tell you, over the course of a campaign against the Russians, we're going to need this many artillery shells, this many tanks, this many planes.
00:24:10.600The attrition rate will be such, and this is what you will need to supply us with if you want this thing to last more than a week.
00:24:34.760I wonder if they're coming to a point where they realize that there is a mismatch between what they think they can do and what they can do in reality.
00:24:48.020If you remember in his press conference with Keir Starmer, he looked at him and asked him, well, you can take Russia on your own, can't you?
00:25:02.180Because he knows that this is completely unrealistic.
00:25:06.260Macron knows that this is unrealistic.
00:25:08.340And this is before getting into things like communications, electronic warfare, being able to stand up to Russia in electronic warfare, which they probably cannot do.
00:25:18.940Their dependence on American satellites for targeting.
00:26:14.180So do you think that, because we've watched this pantomime over the last couple of weeks of European leaders getting together and explaining how they're going to spend a lot more money on defense.
00:26:23.260Now, they do it in such a way as to imply that this money that they're spending on defense will then promptly be used against Russia.
00:26:32.520It could just be that they're cycling money around the European defense stocks.
00:26:42.540It's that, firstly, where are they going to get the energy for this?
00:26:51.180If they are going to go to the Gulf and try to get it from the Muslim world, these will be much harsher towards them than the Russians ever will be.
00:27:02.620Remember, the Russians really didn't want a problem with Europe.
00:27:04.900They lashed out in 2008 over Georgia and then in 2014 over Ukraine because there was a coup in Ukraine against the duly elected government.
00:27:18.280Well, I think that Putin has a cause of cause of ballet.