TRIGGERnometry - Triggernometry - Ep. 1 Gideon Rachman

00:00:00.240 Gideon Rachman, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:02.340 Thank you very much.

00:00:11.280 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:15.120 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:16.300 And this is the show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet about subjects they know nothing about.

00:00:22.840 At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:26.980 We're here at the world-famous Angel Comedy Club and our amazing expert guest this week is Gideon Rachman,

00:00:34.140 who's the Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator for the Financial Times, a renowned author and winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism.

00:00:41.860 Gideon Rachman, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:43.660 Thank you very much.

00:00:44.480 So Gideon, tell us a little bit about how you are, where you are, what's your background, what's been your journey to this place?

00:01:00.640 Well, in a way quite conventional, but like a lot of things, there's sort of a bit of chance, a bit of luck chucked in.

00:01:06.620 And so, God, what is my background?

00:01:10.700 So, well, I was born in London, but my parents were South Africans, South African Jews, and their parents had been Lithuanian, Latvian.

00:01:19.180 So it's a kind of typical immigrant story.

00:01:21.760 There was a whole bunch of Lithuanian, Latvian Jews who, I think, intended to go to America and gone on the wrong boat, end up in South Africa.

00:01:28.800 And ended up in South Africa.

00:01:34.160 So, you know, OK.

00:01:35.080 So they were there.

00:01:36.020 And then for my good fortune, because you didn't particularly want to, even as a white person, grow up in apartheid South Africa. 0.98

00:01:42.180 It's quite a screwed up place. 0.53

00:01:44.680 My dad was an academic, moved to Britain before I was born. 0.69

00:01:48.880 So I was born here.

00:01:49.580 And then, yeah, you know, I did the kind of conventional path to the BBC, I guess.

00:02:00.560 PPE at Oxford?

00:02:01.320 No, I didn't.

00:02:02.800 Not quite.

00:02:03.460 I did history at Cambridge.

00:02:05.380 But I was also, I was fortunate in the sense that, you know, I now see with my kids a lot of scratching my head.

00:02:10.100 What should I do?

00:02:10.920 Should I do this?

00:02:11.400 Should I do that?

00:02:12.220 And I was kind of, knew I wanted to be a journalist very early on.

00:02:16.660 I don't quite know why.

00:02:17.860 Was it a respected profession back then?

00:02:21.480 Yeah.

00:02:21.900 Because right now, I didn't mean that as an insult.

00:02:23.680 But right now, I get the sense that it's losing.

00:02:25.160 No, no, you're a totally fair question.

00:02:26.400 Yeah, no, because in a slightly creepy, I was a really sort of creepy eight-year-old.

00:02:29.980 I was saying, I want to be editor at the Times.

00:02:31.960 You know, which was like a, you know, respectable thing to do then.

00:02:39.940 I love it if your editor is watching this.

00:02:43.000 But, yeah.

00:02:44.760 Yeah, so then, so that then meant that I wasn't quite kind of focused about sort of getting the right things on my CV, editing the student paper, da-da-da-da-da.

00:02:54.560 And then I got a job at the BBC World Service when I left, which was like the biggest fringe element of the BBC.

00:03:01.680 You know, I got rejected for the mainstream bit of the BBC, for ITN, for Reuters, et cetera.

00:03:05.760 I eventually got the last thing and did that for a while.

00:03:09.180 And actually, that was good because it made, although it was the most obscure bit of the BBC, it was concerned with international affairs.

00:03:15.100 And so that got me interested in not doing domestic politics, but looking at the wider world.

00:03:20.180 And then, for a mixture of sort of personal and professional reasons, decided to leave the BBC and go freelance and go to Washington.

00:03:27.720 The personal bit was my girlfriend, then now wife, was studying at Georgetown, so I wanted to be with her.

00:03:33.900 And also, I wanted to get to America and I wanted to be in print.

00:03:35.800 And then, you know, a couple of lucky breaks along the way.

00:03:38.940 So the paper I went mainly to write for went bankrupt after 18 months.

00:03:42.960 It was a paper called The Sunday Correspondent.

00:03:45.120 And I kind of, in the moment of desperation, picked up the phone and just rang everybody I knew and said,

00:03:50.280 How? You know, I need a job.

00:03:51.980 And as it turned out, the guy doing the sort of deputy editor of the U.S. section of The Economist had gone that week.

00:03:58.760 And so the door opened at the right time.

00:04:01.140 And then I was at The Economist for 15 years.

00:04:04.640 And that was good because I had a couple of foreign correspondent jobs, particularly one in Asia, which I had been very West-centric,

00:04:12.800 both in the kind of history I studied, you know, Europe, America, and then where I wanted to go.

00:04:17.700 I wanted to go straight to the U.S.

00:04:19.320 And then they said, Will you be Bangkok correspondent?

00:04:22.480 And I said, OK.

00:04:24.020 But I went and it was a good time to go.

00:04:25.940 It was the early 90s.

00:04:27.280 And so the boom in Southeast Asia had happened and the boom in China was just beginning.

00:04:33.700 And although Thailand's actually a few hours' flight from China, it's a very powerful ethnic Chinese business community who were very tuned into what was going on.

00:04:42.120 So I quite quickly got interested in this, what was clearly kind of world-changing development.

00:04:48.200 And it was the right time to get interested in it because it's something I then followed for like 20 years on.

00:04:52.640 And your latest book is about Asia.

00:04:54.200 Yeah, so, yeah, I wrote this book called Easternization, which is a slightly unwieldy title.

00:04:58.620 But the conceit is that, you know, we've had 500 years where the whole world is westernizing.

00:05:04.420 And because of the shift in economic power to Asia, we're going to begin to easternize that the power of influence of Asia in the world, 0.84

00:05:12.580 particularly of China, but not just China, India, countries of Southeast Asia, is going to grow.

00:05:16.840 So it's going to start with economics, but it'll move into politics, culture, and so on, and already is happening.

00:05:22.420 And how do you see the world?

00:05:23.740 You're talking, that's a really fascinating term, easternizing, because we obviously use westernize a lot,

00:05:28.340 but that is not a term that I've particularly heard.

00:05:31.300 But bearing in mind that China isn't a democracy, how do you think that's going to affect us in the West?

00:05:35.760 I think it's going to affect us more than we've reckoned.

00:05:38.360 You know, we thought, oh, well, you know, we'll sell them some stuff, and it's fine.

00:05:43.080 And then we had two, I think, illusions, which, you know, obviously history is not written, so we can't be sure.

00:05:51.260 But there was a period, particularly that early period of the 90s where I was talking about,

00:05:56.300 where western confidence was very high because the Berlin Wall had just fallen.

00:06:00.740 And we thought, okay, look, particularly if the Chinese embrace capitalism, their society will become much more diverse,

00:06:08.740 individualism will rise up, and they'll have to become a democracy, or the whole thing will come crashing down.

00:06:12.900 It'll just happen.

00:06:14.060 And if they become a democracy, well, you know, problem over there, we'll all get on.

00:06:18.460 And I think both those jumps in the argument were mistaken.

00:06:22.260 We were wrong to assume that they could, that capitalism would necessarily entail a liberalization of the political system.

00:06:28.060 And we're still waiting, you know, 2018, and anything that's becoming more authoritarian.

00:06:32.740 That's right.

00:06:33.100 I was just about to mention that Xi Jinping, he just basically sees power forever, hasn't he?

00:06:37.840 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:38.400 Is that the right summation of it?

00:06:40.020 Yeah, more or less.

00:06:41.200 I mean, we'll see.

00:06:43.480 But he's certainly given himself the ability to do it.

00:06:46.240 They've changed the Chinese constitution.

00:06:47.660 And the Chinese, you know, although they never said that we will become democratic, they did say, or the kind of official line you would hear in Beijing is,

00:06:58.360 well, we've solved the problem of succession that, you know, the problem with, obviously, what authoritarian countries keep running into is eventually you get a sort of Stalin or a Mao

00:07:06.320 who just sits there and screws the whole place up, and it's a disaster.

00:07:09.420 And they said, no, we have got a collective leadership now of the Communist Party, and the leader will change every eight years.

00:07:15.880 And we've done it two times now.

00:07:17.580 We had, you know, Deng step down, and then you had Jiang Zemin for eight years, and then he stepped down, and then Hu Jintao for eight years.

00:07:23.400 See, it works, you know.

00:07:24.640 And then now you've got this leader.

00:07:25.820 I said, you know what, I might not step down.

00:07:28.280 And so suddenly, and of course, they're all having to pretend it's fine.

00:07:32.420 You know, we're with this.

00:07:34.160 But in fact, a lot of Chinese liberals, and they exist, you know, are dismayed, really dismayed, because they sort of are very worried about the direction the country is going now.

00:07:45.800 But equally, and quite sinisterly for us, and it comes back to the question you asked, well, does this begin to affect us?

00:07:51.060 One of the ways that Xi Jinping is consolidating power is by stoking up nationalism and saying, you know, China's strong again, we're standing up for ourselves, we're going to reclaim these territories we should have had.

00:08:07.200 And, you know, they're not as dangerous or as aggressive as the Russians in their behavior, I think partly because they're playing a longer game. 0.91

00:08:15.520 I think mine, sort of one of the ways I read Russian behavior is they feel like a knife's at their throat and that they've got to do anything, whatever. 0.94

00:08:23.880 I mean, I don't agree with their assessment, but that's their sort of view.

00:08:27.260 I think the Chinese feel on the rather differently, that they're in the ascendancy and they're not going to screw it up.

00:08:33.580 So by frightening the West too much, they're just going to gradually build up a position of strength.

00:08:38.860 Now, Trump's really disrupted that by the trade war he's declared because just as we assumed that China would become democratic, wrongly, they maybe not assumed but certainly hoped and built their policy around the idea that the West would keep its markets open because, you know, whatever.

00:09:00.060 That we either genuinely believed in globalization or that the mutual economic interests would persuade everyone to do that.

00:09:07.240 And now Trump's come in and said, you know what, I'm going to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum.

00:09:11.180 I'm going to block you on intellectual property and so on.

00:09:13.980 And how China responds to that is going to be a big, big story in the next five to ten years because I think it's potentially kind of dangerous.

00:09:22.100 Of course, I don't buy the idea that free trade guarantees peace, but it creates an intersection of interest, which makes it much less likely that countries will start, you know, going to war.

00:09:33.840 Therefore, if the Chinese feel actually now the Americans are trying to take down their economy in some way, there's much less incentive for them to say go easy in the South China Sea, for example, which the Americans still regard as their American lake, as some American guy put it to me in the Pentagon.

00:09:54.200 It's a wonderfully arrogant comment.

00:09:55.820 Yeah, but it's a curious thing because if you remember Kilconomics last year, you remember Harold Malgram, who's the father of one of our future guests, Pippa Malgram.

00:10:05.680 He was talking about the fact that he felt that Obama was weak on the South China Sea.

00:10:11.980 And what he was talking about is basically the Americans can see through the satellites exactly what's happening there.

00:10:17.300 And the Chinese would incrementally step up their presence. 1.00

00:10:20.660 They would see that there was no response, even though they knew that the Americans had seen what was happening.

00:10:24.780 And what we're what we're now seeing is an emboldened China as a result of Obama's presence.

00:10:29.380 Well, you know, so many different. He's right to a degree, but I don't think Obama would have been correct to challenge them.

00:10:35.680 But there's a different there are different ways of looking at it.

00:10:38.340 He's right. What he's right about is that the Chinese did it very cleverly because they moved incrementally. 0.94

00:10:44.780 And each little step would not be enough to confront them on.

00:10:49.280 And I remember talking to an Obama guy who was who was following all this and he was, you know, senior Asia advisor who said to me, you know, how am I meant to there was the time they were worrying about something called the second Thomas Shoal, which is something that the Philippines used to reassert their claims.

00:11:09.840 Anyway, it's a sunken ship, which they resupply as a way of saying, you know, this bit of water is Filipino.

00:11:16.280 And they were that they the Americans were worried that the Chinese were going to sink the ship or something crazy like that.

00:11:22.000 Anyway, this guy said to me, how am I meant to go and tell the president that he should risk a war with China over a sunken battleship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which is underwater half the time?

00:11:32.120 He's not going to do it. And he's right not to do it.

00:11:34.760 But so what the Chinese did was over time, advance, advance, advance.

00:11:39.740 And each little step creates sort of facts in the water.

00:11:42.040 But then I think there's a broader question of, well, you know, are they you know, you said wonderfully arrogant comment, American Lake.

00:11:48.980 Yeah, maybe maybe the Americans should just say, you know what, we have dominated the Pacific since 1945, but China's rising.

00:11:55.940 It's not going to be like that anymore. And we should come to some sort of tacit agreement with them about or maybe even explicit agreement about spheres of influence and so on.

00:12:06.160 Because otherwise, the only other way to stop that is to eventually have a war with them. And we're not up for that.

00:12:10.280 So I don't. That's the debate that's got to be had, really.

00:12:15.020 But what I find quite fascinating about China is this.

00:12:18.400 Like, for instance, my mother's from Venezuela, which is a communist country in inverted commas.

00:12:22.940 And China is a communist country. But having been to China, it's in many ways the most consumerist capitalist society that I've ever encountered in my life.

00:12:32.380 I mean, could you explain that dichotomy a little bit for us as to how you can be both communist and, you know, have a Gucci bag on you?

00:12:40.500 Yeah, well, that's that's that's their genius.

00:12:42.420 But no, look, I would say they're communist only politically now in the sense that they or even Leninist, that they believe in a one party state with a sort of communist party structure, which is a very real thing.

00:12:58.080 So that, you know, that in universities, for example, the communist party operates, ambitious students will join the communist party organization, companies will have a communist party member on the board.

00:13:12.260 You know, it's it's it's it's a thing.

00:13:13.940 But it's a it's a mechanism of political control rather than an economic system anymore.

00:13:22.200 And I think that there are probably still vestiges of the sense that, well, we're doing it for the people.

00:13:28.880 You hear that in, say, she's rhetoric about their greatest claim is how many people they've lifted out of poverty.

00:13:35.740 Hundreds of millions, they will say. And I think the World Bank would agree.

00:13:38.380 And they'll so that's sort of communism by other means, communism by capitalist means, but trying to create more wealth.

00:13:47.240 And so, you know, I don't think they're completely cynical, but but I would say they're communist primarily in political terms.

00:14:03.560 So I guess what we'll start with is Trump is in power at the moment.

00:14:07.460 And Russia are behaving like a supervillain in a cheap airport novel. 0.88

00:14:11.820 And we have Kim Jong-un in charge of North Korea.

00:14:16.160 Is the world coming to the end or is this how it's always been?

00:14:20.060 It's definitely not how it's always been.

00:14:21.900 I mean, it feels like a very strange time.

00:14:25.500 I mean, I guess for me, the defining period of my sort of adult life, journalistic career was 1989.

00:14:31.920 You know, the fall of the Berlin Wall and so on.

00:14:33.420 And that marked the end of a period that I'd grown up in, the Cold War.

00:14:37.080 And then really, I'd say from 89 to 2008, there was a sort of continuity.

00:14:42.040 We felt like, you know, famously Fukuyama said there was the end of history, even if that's a bit of an overstatement.

00:14:47.280 But that the Western ideas had triumphed.

00:14:50.420 The West was pretty stable.

00:14:51.820 The rest of the world was kind of, you know, the number of democracies around the world was increasing.

00:14:55.720 Generally, people thought globalization was a good, good thing of, you know, a bit of a generalization.

00:15:02.960 But things felt pretty stable.

00:15:04.400 And then I think you have the financial crisis.

00:15:06.360 And I think that, for me, was one of the triggers for things to begin to go wrong.

00:15:10.600 But when, you know, you mentioned Russia behaving like a supervillain, et cetera, et cetera, Kim Jong-un.

00:15:16.180 But for me, the really disturbing thing about the current period is not so much that there are rogue nations.

00:15:22.600 There always have been.

00:15:24.420 But what's going on inside the West?

00:15:26.720 I mean, it would have been unimaginable, really, until very recently, that somebody like Donald Trump could become president of the United States.

00:15:34.960 Mainly, actually, because of his personal style, which I think sends a very negative political message.

00:15:39.200 But also, he is reversing all sorts of kind of shibboleths of American foreign policy about free trade, whatever.

00:15:46.180 And then I think there's also a wider rot in the West.

00:15:49.420 I mean, I think that the whole connection between Brexit and Trump is a complicated one.

00:15:53.400 But there is some sort of connection in the sense of discontent that fired it.

00:15:57.660 But equally, if you look in Europe, I mean, the politics of countries that seem relatively stable to quite recently, Spain, Italy, looking really dodgy.

00:16:06.420 And in Eastern Europe, countries that we thought, OK, they've joined the democratic camp, pretty solid now.

00:16:12.440 Hungary is really, I think, slipping away from democracy.

00:16:14.840 Poland, arguably, as well.

00:16:17.300 And then finally, you've got this, I think, sense in the West, which maybe is sort of loosely connected to what's going on generally,

00:16:24.400 that our period as the dominant bloc in the world, Europe and the US, is coming to a close.

00:16:31.780 You've got the rise of a new power in China, which is now, by some measures, the largest economy in the world.

00:16:36.860 You've got a much more assertive India.

00:16:38.140 And in themselves, those needn't be threatening things.

00:16:42.680 But China does, is not a democracy, is in a way a kind of wounded country, which has a lot of, you know, wants to put behind what it calls itself,

00:16:52.660 the century of humiliation and feels that it was humiliated by the West.

00:16:56.380 So there's a shift of economic and political power as well, which I think in itself would be destabilizing.

00:17:01.400 So, yeah, it's a weird time.

00:17:04.100 And you said you used the word dodgy when you were talking about some of those countries.

00:17:09.300 Can you just go into detail what you mean by that?

00:17:11.640 Dodgy, yeah.

00:17:12.640 Well, OK, so what was I talking about, Hungary or Italy or, you know, I mean, I think in Hungary in particular,

00:17:19.500 it's a while since I've been there.

00:17:20.720 But, you know, one of the things you do as journalists, and maybe it's not the best way of gauging a thing,

00:17:25.940 but you go and talk to other journalists.

00:17:27.500 And other journalists will tell you in Hungary, you know, people I've known for a few years,

00:17:32.880 that basically freedom of the press is closing down.

00:17:35.660 I mean, they wouldn't, that's not what the official line is, but it's the lived experience of people there.

00:17:43.360 And you look at some of the messages that Orbán is putting out.

00:17:47.180 Now, I think that the war for the refugees was a pretty brutal measure,

00:17:53.200 but there's some argument about whether Merkel's policy was sustainable in itself.

00:17:57.040 You know, you could argue that actually Western Europe is tacitly doing some of what Orbán already did.

00:18:02.780 So I don't think in itself that that was, you know, people, reasonable people could differ on that.

00:18:07.980 But if you look at the rhetoric that he's using in the campaign, it's pretty racist.

00:18:12.720 And it's, you know, it's anti-Semitic, the whole thing about sort of this hidden power,

00:18:17.560 which he attributes to George Soros, manipulate, trying to destroy Hungary.

00:18:21.680 It's real classic sort of central European authoritarianism.

00:18:25.140 And Poland, I don't think, is as far down the line,

00:18:27.560 although actually it's the one that's being prosecuted by the European Commission, not Hungary.

00:18:31.020 But that's for internal European politics.

00:18:33.340 But things are changing in Poland.

00:18:35.320 And there's also this kind of looming presence of Russia,

00:18:37.600 which I think, you know, we thought of Russian interference, Konstantin, as a bit of a joke, you know, until recently.

00:18:44.800 But it's real and it affected the American election.

00:18:47.740 And I think it is, you know, the Russians are quite astute at picking off bits of the EU 0.77

00:18:52.960 and including Hungary and maybe Greece a bit.

00:18:56.160 And so, yeah, that contributes.

00:18:58.520 And also just generally a slightly menacing presence.

00:19:01.340 And I think that sort of slightly contributes to the sense that things are beginning to fall apart,

00:19:05.100 as well as Brexit, of course.

00:19:06.160 Well, what do you make of the whole Russia thing?

00:19:08.000 Because one of the interesting things for me that I've noticed is that

00:19:10.540 since the Skripal affair, the poisoning in Salisbury,

00:19:14.760 actually a lot of other stuff has started to come out.

00:19:17.280 And the British government is now investigating 14 other poisonings

00:19:20.640 and other unexplained deaths, Boris Berezovsky and other people.

00:19:24.580 What do you think has been happening?

00:19:26.400 And what do you think is going to happen with Russia going forward?

00:19:28.160 Well, look, I mean, I'm not doing the investigation.

00:19:30.220 But obviously, you know, that was an example of good journalism.

00:19:34.640 And BuzzFeed actually put together that list of 14 people, which had been sort of circulating.

00:19:39.540 And then most people were not paying attention.

00:19:41.800 And there was a sense that the Brits were kind of a bit reluctant to really go into it

00:19:45.940 because what do you do?

00:19:47.360 And, you know, do you really want a full-scale confrontation with Russia?

00:19:50.500 And also there's financial interests at stake that we know about.

00:19:54.020 What are the financial interests?

00:19:55.380 Well, I mean, Russians are big investors in London, in London property,

00:20:01.400 flotations of Russian companies.

00:20:03.280 You know, Ola Deripaska, for example, just floated his company on the stock exchange.

00:20:09.420 So Russian money has become important.

00:20:11.700 You know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a whole sort of penumbra of law firms,

00:20:16.480 PR firms, merchant banks, et cetera, who will have, you know,

00:20:20.840 for whom the Russians are quite important clients or have been.

00:20:23.280 Well, this is what I was going to ask you because my impression is from the figures that I've seen,

00:20:26.680 actually, as a country, Britain doesn't do a huge amount of trade with Russia,

00:20:31.060 from what I understand.

00:20:32.840 But what you're talking about is their kind of what you might call vested interest

00:20:36.580 within the establishment.

00:20:37.800 Is that the breakdown?

00:20:39.360 Is that why we're not perhaps being as strong on Russia as we might be otherwise?

00:20:42.660 Look, I mean, I don't know how – the short answer is I don't know.

00:20:46.960 I mean, I don't know quite how these decisions are made or so on.

00:20:49.520 But it's certainly the case that Russian banks and financiers were capable,

00:20:58.200 because they were, you know, individually had big deals and money attached to them,

00:21:02.420 capable of making influential friends in the West who wouldn't necessarily want a fight with them.

00:21:07.940 I mean, famously, Oleg Deripaska had this party, you know,

00:21:11.240 on the yacht where Mandelson turned up and George Osborne showed up.

00:21:14.300 And, you know, Deripaska always has this big party in Davos as well,

00:21:18.040 and everyone shows up, you know.

00:21:19.480 So they're quite good at kind of becoming part of the scene.

00:21:23.860 Schmoozing.

00:21:24.500 Yeah, absolutely.

00:21:26.220 And schmoozing with money attached.

00:21:28.640 And the money seems clean because it's like it's an above-the-board contract.

00:21:32.940 We'll apply you to float the company or whatever.

00:21:36.240 You know, give us PR advice.

00:21:37.520 And so for that reason, there certainly would enter into people's minds,

00:21:44.620 well, do we necessarily want to put this at risk?

00:21:48.820 It's quite interesting talking about Russia and going into detail about it.

00:21:53.260 How worried do you think the Americans are by Russia and what they're currently doing at the moment?

00:21:58.800 We'll turn it to which Americans. 0.53

00:21:59.800 I mean, you know, I mean, the interesting thing is that because America is so partisan-divided down the middle,

00:22:07.000 that there's half the country, the Democrats, the Hillary Clinton fans,

00:22:13.440 who are convinced that the Russians interfered in the election,

00:22:17.960 and the Republicans really don't want to believe it for their own reasons.

00:22:23.860 And within that, I mean, that's interestingly a kind of reverse of the Cold War,

00:22:30.100 where traditionally the Democrats as the center-left party wouldn't have been as hawkish on Russia,

00:22:34.080 and the Republicans would have been the people banging the table on Russia.

00:22:36.860 And now that's changed.

00:22:38.460 But within that, there are all sorts of interesting kind of breakdowns.

00:22:42.080 I mean, I think that the FBI, who are quite kind of professional,

00:22:45.360 and, you know, as kind of white men, the leadership of the FBI,

00:22:51.260 you would say their demographic profile would be there'd be quite likely to be Republicans

00:22:55.080 or have voted Trump.

00:22:57.280 But they are pursuing this.

00:23:00.340 And, I mean, I had an interesting conversation, was it about 15 months ago,

00:23:06.580 with somebody who was a kind of ex-spook in America who was, A, hated Trump,

00:23:12.780 but, B, was very exultant that Robert Mueller had been put in charge of this

00:23:18.240 because he said, you know, this guy is very, very tough, very professional,

00:23:22.420 he'll leave no stone unturned, and it's really bad news for Trump that this guy is on his tail.

00:23:26.940 And so I think that although there's all this hyper-partisanship,

00:23:32.100 within that there is a kind of hardcore of kind of professional securocrats

00:23:38.860 who are genuinely offended by what they see, they think this is all happening.

00:23:43.360 And you're convinced that Russia was involved in the American election?

00:23:46.980 Yeah.

00:23:47.700 I mean, you know, to what end, we don't know, and to what level, we don't know.

00:23:51.840 I mean, you know...

00:23:52.900 I mean, they weren't trying to help Hillary Clinton, I think, that much as always.

00:23:55.920 Although, actually, interestingly, they were also agitated.

00:23:58.880 They were trying to cause social disarray, generally,

00:24:01.460 so that if you look at what's already come out, you know, the early indictments by Mueller,

00:24:05.220 they were, for example, trying to stage Black Lives Matter demonstrations

00:24:08.800 because they just wanted a sense of social disarray and social conflict.

00:24:13.860 Within that, clearly, they were pro-Trump.

00:24:17.100 Now, what level?

00:24:20.500 You know, how much?

00:24:21.680 We don't know.

00:24:22.660 How effective?

00:24:23.480 We don't know.

00:24:23.880 And that probably is an unanswerable question

00:24:25.820 because you don't know why people voted or what little thing it was that...

00:24:30.680 But, you know, I remember I was at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia in July of 2016,

00:24:37.620 and it was a chaotic beginning

00:24:40.260 because the emails of the then-head of the Democratic Party,

00:24:46.200 Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, I think, had just been released, like, two days before,

00:24:50.020 and she'd been slagging off Bernie Sanders in internal emails.

00:24:53.020 And this caused outrage amongst the Sanders supporters.

00:24:56.100 So the first day of the convention was chaos because every time a Clinton person took to the stage,

00:25:01.840 they were booed.

00:25:02.640 Schultz had just had to resign.

00:25:04.600 And I remember doing, you know, much as you're interviewing me now,

00:25:07.220 interviewing a mate of mine who'd worked in the Obama administration,

00:25:10.360 and there was already some indication this had been a Russian hack.

00:25:14.060 And we did this interview, and I looked back at it,

00:25:15.860 and we were, in a way, as curiously innocent.

00:25:17.540 We were just saying, gosh, you know, if this was really the Russians, 0.91

00:25:20.140 that's really quite something, isn't it?

00:25:22.840 Little did we know, you know.

00:25:24.480 It was just the beginning.

00:25:25.700 And then there was this other leak of the pedestrian emails,

00:25:29.020 which, again, came out at an actually crucial time,

00:25:32.080 just when Trump was being pursued over the sex stuff.

00:25:35.160 Like, within hours, the pedestrian emails were dumped.

00:25:39.240 And so, yeah, you know, potentially it was well done, you know, in a technical sense.

00:25:45.180 And I think it's pretty clear that Mueller thinks it was from the Russians via –

00:25:49.480 but then, you know, the connections become really fascinating.

00:25:51.720 One of the interesting things for me is I can feel myself becoming a conspiracy theorist.

00:25:56.320 So I used to, like, laugh at conspiracy theorists.

00:26:00.020 You know, it's all rubbish, whatever, partly because my mates were in power.

00:26:04.000 I think conspiracy theories happen, or you become a conspiracy theorist,

00:26:07.680 when you feel powerless and when you think, God, you know, how did that happen?

00:26:10.400 That shouldn't have happened.

00:26:11.520 You know, this is outrageous.

00:26:12.700 They all know each other.

00:26:13.380 And sort of my group, very, very broadly termed, was sort of in power.

00:26:20.440 You know, people I knew or who'd been at university with me all kind of felt familiar,

00:26:25.780 shared my discourse to these whatever, you know, they were – 0.93

00:26:29.600 and now these kind of maniacs are in power. 0.82

00:26:31.600 Trump, you know, what's going on? 0.86

00:26:33.300 And so since you're on the outs, you're suddenly thinking, oh, my God, you know, X knows Y and Y knows Z.

00:26:39.940 And maybe I'm making all sorts of dodgy, you know, false connections.

00:26:43.320 But, I mean, to give you an example, I did this – I did a lunch with the FT,

00:26:48.380 which is kind of like a set piece interview with a mate of Trump's.

00:26:51.620 And the attraction for me was that we did it in Mar-a-Lago, you know, in Trump's club.

00:26:56.120 And then, you know, this guy, Italian guy comes over and, oh, you know, he's the Northern League's organizer in the U.S.

00:27:06.060 And he's also Trump's neighbor.

00:27:07.740 And then, you know, we get talking to another guy who's just come back from seeing Orban in Hungary.

00:27:11.820 And you think, oh, my God, you know, dot, dot, dot, dot.

00:27:14.560 And, you know, you wonder whether, oh, should I sort of, like, come on, so what?

00:27:19.060 They know each other.

00:27:19.720 Lots of liberals know each other.

00:27:21.280 Or think, actually, there's something quite weird going on here.

00:27:23.960 And I don't quite know where I am on that.

00:27:25.420 Well, a curious thing – sorry, Francis, before you jump in.

00:27:29.000 When you were talking about how the people that you knew were in power are kind of broadly your circle.

00:27:34.160 Yeah.

00:27:34.820 Without making this personal, what I was kind of thinking is, well, isn't that why Brexit and Trump happened?

00:27:40.140 People were kind of going, there's a small elite who are controlling everything or managing everything or in power.

00:27:46.960 And we need to change that.

00:27:48.760 Do you think that was what caused it?

00:27:51.860 Look, lots of things caused it.

00:27:53.700 But, I mean, yeah.

00:27:57.760 I think the thing about elites is that they tend to think they've got there because they deserve to be there.

00:28:05.020 And I certainly feel that about myself.

00:28:08.440 But, no.

00:28:10.080 I mean, what do I mean?

00:28:12.180 What's the group?

00:28:12.920 Okay, so to give you an odd example.

00:28:14.860 Like, the only – I mean, I like to say, you know, Clinton's frightfully well.

00:28:17.700 I don't, but there was – the only time I've ever sat in a room with Hillary Clinton for an extended period was, oddly enough – it's a complicated story.

00:28:28.080 But I ended up watching the Women's World Cup final with her in her hotel room in Greece.

00:28:32.740 And with a bunch of, like, her entourage and, you know, people who were traveling with her.

00:28:41.100 She was on a trip and I knew –

00:28:42.180 She watches soccer? 0.99

00:28:43.420 She does.

00:28:43.960 Well, I think she had to watch it because, A, it was American, B, it was women. 1.00

00:28:46.660 Oh, okay.

00:28:47.240 And so – and her daughter was in the crowd.

00:28:50.000 So, you know, the only time she got interested was when the camera would pan over to Chelsea. 0.98

00:28:53.280 She would go, ah!

00:28:54.360 But – and then, you know, actually, I think she was desperate to get on with some work.

00:28:57.780 But, you know, she was kind of tied to watching –

00:28:59.400 Tell me you didn't explain the offside rule to her.

00:29:01.200 I didn't.

00:29:01.840 I think I did want to say, God, this football's not bad, which is really not the thing.

00:29:06.740 But, no, but then when it went into extra time, they then had to watch that and penalty.

00:29:11.240 It was all a bit of a bore.

00:29:12.160 But, anyway –

00:29:12.780 I keep sidetracking you.

00:29:13.700 Sorry, I can keep going.

00:29:14.300 Yeah, so, no.

00:29:14.880 So, you know, just chatting to the people there, like – I was struck – I mean, actually, quite a good thing for Britain.

00:29:22.140 How many of them had been educated in Britain or spent time there or were Oxford graduates or whatever.

00:29:26.680 So, it's this kind of Harvard, Oxford, you know, chuck in a bit of Goldman Sachs or whatever, you know, this group.

00:29:33.920 And I don't see it as particularly sinister.

00:29:35.960 But I can see if you're sort of outside, you might think, oh, I don't like that.

00:29:40.180 I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, that – I mean, Trump essentially marketed himself

00:29:44.520 as being a man of the people.

00:29:46.140 Yeah.

00:29:46.480 Whereas when he started his company, he got a million-dollar loan.

00:29:49.720 Sure, from his dad.

00:29:50.600 Yeah, absolutely.

00:29:51.540 I mean, do you think that we're going to look back on Trump as being a profoundly negative thing

00:29:57.000 for American politics, or is it slightly more complex than that?

00:30:00.760 Well, I mean, you know, I'm biased, so I think, yeah.

00:30:03.740 Yeah, I think it's really bad.

00:30:06.440 But what I do think is, you know, it's kind of weird because, you know, a lot of people

00:30:13.200 have done history at school or university.

00:30:15.580 I think, you know, if we're all still – if humanity's still around in 200 years' time,

00:30:18.800 people will be writing essays on what the hell happened.

00:30:21.180 How did Donald Trump win the presidency?

00:30:22.840 What did it mean?

00:30:24.060 And, you know, just as they write essays about Jefferson or the American Civil War,

00:30:27.760 it's a huge event, what's just happened, and it's very early to try and assess it.

00:30:35.520 But I was struck, you know, on a recent trip to America, and I did, you know, my tour of

00:30:41.180 establishment mates, so I did Washington, New York, Harvard, and speaking to kind of cross-section

00:30:48.140 of people, and they were very divided.

00:30:51.200 I mean, none of them were Trump fans.

00:30:52.680 There was a group of sort of super optimists about America who said, you know, it's not

00:30:58.520 good, but he'll lose American establishment.

00:31:02.600 Institutions are very powerful.

00:31:04.780 This country is very grounded.

00:31:06.220 It's fine.

00:31:07.660 Not fine, but we'll get through it.

00:31:09.920 And then there's another group who say, oh, my God, we're kind of tipping all the way into

00:31:14.120 fascism, and, you know, American democracy is in serious, serious trouble, and this could

00:31:18.240 end in, you know, civil conflict or an erosion of America's democratic institutions, which

00:31:23.940 we won't come back from.

00:31:25.660 And then there's obviously, those are the two poles. 0.99

00:31:27.760 But there's that second group, the real alarmists, are not sort of idiots. 0.99

00:31:31.880 They're, you know, professors here and there or people involved in politics. 0.98

00:31:36.820 And then, you know, within that, there's a whole spectrum of opinion.

00:31:39.280 And I don't know which, look, I suspect that Trump is, in one sense, an aberration, and

00:31:47.700 that you'll get more normal presidents after that, but that he's done lasting damage to

00:31:52.560 the discourse of the way Americans interact with each other, the way they think about their

00:31:59.940 institutions.

00:32:00.800 And that's where I think that, you know, the whole Russian thing comes back. 0.98

00:32:03.660 I mean, because I think that part of what Russia's narrative is, is that, you know, there's

00:32:09.500 this clear-cut distinction that they like to make in the West between democratic countries

00:32:13.800 with the rule of law and undemocratic countries with a kind of, you know, a jungle.

00:32:18.020 That's wrong.

00:32:19.420 Everybody's at it.

00:32:20.300 You know, all institutions are rotten, and you're no better than us.

00:32:24.740 And that's their kind of argument.

00:32:26.060 And to the extent that Americans start buying that and saying, actually, you know what?

00:32:29.340 The FBI is rotten.

00:32:30.420 Yeah, we do have a deep state.

00:32:31.720 But, yeah, you can't believe anything you hear on the news.

00:32:34.680 That's really corrosive.

00:32:37.340 And I think we're slightly better off in Britain, but only slightly, because obviously Brexit

00:32:41.860 has been incredibly divisive.

00:32:43.260 But I think, by and large, the BBC is still sort of broadly respected.

00:32:48.300 There are some institutions that most of the country think, OK, they're impartial.

00:32:53.260 We kind of trust them.

00:32:55.160 But, so I think America's further down the road to that really corrosive sense, which

00:33:01.280 means, in the end, you don't have a society.

00:33:02.940 If you don't have a common version of truth, a common version of institutions that you can

00:33:07.300 say, OK, we'll allow those to arbitrate and we'll all accept it, you're in trouble.

00:33:11.380 It's very interesting that you're talking about America in this way.

00:33:14.300 And then you were talking a few minutes ago about China being in the ascendancy.

00:33:18.740 Do you think the fact that people voted for Trump is actually a reflection of the fact

00:33:24.220 that America are no longer the world's greatest superpower and it's sort of a crisis of confidence?

00:33:28.400 To some extent.

00:33:29.100 I mean, I think, yeah, you know, that Trump is one of the first president's successful

00:33:33.040 candidates I can know.

00:33:34.200 He had a very pessimistic narrative.

00:33:36.220 I mean, so that, you know, having now being fairly ancient, 54, I've seen a few presidential

00:33:42.320 elections.

00:33:42.740 And generally, the winning candidate is the optimist.

00:33:45.680 So Reagan is mourning in America.

00:33:47.780 Bill Clinton's the boy from Hope.

00:33:50.160 Arkansas, you know, and Obama is that, you know, we can change.

00:33:56.320 We're the change we're seeking.

00:33:57.820 There's no red and blue America. 0.82

00:33:59.500 And everyone goes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:00.720 You know, they will go for that.

00:34:01.520 And he has Trump saying, you know, the country is being destroyed.

00:34:05.200 It's carnage, he says in his inaugural speech.

00:34:08.560 And this is our last chance to rescue ourselves.

00:34:12.480 It's an incredibly dark vision.

00:34:15.040 And that used to be, like, very un-American.

00:34:17.340 And the fact that a small, as friends put it, a large minority of Americans voted for it

00:34:22.820 because, of course, he didn't win, you know, the popular vote.

00:34:27.100 But enough to win is quite disturbing.

00:34:30.940 But actually, I think that that's not just a side point about or liberal sort of kind of

00:34:36.180 complaining that he didn't win.

00:34:37.560 I mean, I think it's one of the signs of trouble in America is that we've now had two

00:34:41.900 presidents in 16 years elected without winning the popular vote because George W. Bush got

00:34:47.240 beaten by Al Gore, which is a sign of the level of gerrymandering in America as well, which is

00:34:51.700 also a problem.

00:34:52.420 So, Gideon, we touched on earlier on in the interview about anti-Semitism and you saying

00:35:07.260 it was on the rise.

00:35:08.360 Do you think that it's going to rear its ugly head in a major fashion as it's done before?

00:35:13.640 Or do you think it's going to be something that's always there in the background, more or less?

00:35:18.000 Look, I think it's one of the...

00:35:21.280 Wait, sorry.

00:35:21.800 Did you say it was on the rise?

00:35:23.380 Well, I think I mentioned it in Hungary, but I wouldn't actually disagree with it.

00:35:28.080 You think it's on the rise in this country?

00:35:30.000 I don't know about that, but I think what's happened is that it's become a political issue

00:35:34.220 in the West.

00:35:35.060 I don't know whether, you know, if you took a poll of what people's sentiments, you could

00:35:38.160 say there were more or less anti-Semitic.

00:35:40.480 But what has happened is that one of the weird things, and I'm Jewish, is that it was quite

00:35:46.380 nice.

00:35:46.900 I was kind of a fortunate generation of Jews for whom, like, it wasn't an issue, a political

00:35:51.860 issue.

00:35:52.160 People weren't on either side of the barricades on this, and there was a sense that, well,

00:35:56.620 we'd got past it in the, you know, the 1930s, and the lessons had been learned, and that was

00:36:00.640 it.

00:36:01.380 And now, you know, suddenly, whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute in Britain,

00:36:06.120 as you know, it's at the heart of an argument about what's going on inside the Labour Party.

00:36:09.760 But, you know, people in the UK have been understandably very focused on that.

00:36:13.660 But if you pull back a bit, there are similar arguments taking place in France.

00:36:18.260 The week that Corbyn was being dragged over the course of this, there was a march of thousands

00:36:22.880 of people in Paris because of a murder of a Holocaust survivor who, President Macron said

00:36:27.580 very bluntly, was murdered because she was Jewish.

00:36:30.140 She was killed by a couple of young Muslim neighbours.

00:36:33.880 And then, of course, you have this Orban election where it was kind of explicitly anti-Semitic

00:36:39.060 rhetoric.

00:36:39.400 And then, a slightly odd debate in America about, is Trump anti-Semitic?

00:36:46.160 Now, my feeling about that is, well, if he's anti-Semitic, why did his daughter convert 0.63

00:36:49.700 to Orthodox Judaism?

00:36:50.780 It's not like a standard anti-Semitic move.

00:36:54.280 You bring it down from the inside.

00:36:57.420 But it is the case that Trump, via Bannon, got a lot of support from the alt-right.

00:37:05.100 And on that fringe, the fringe of the far right, sure, there's anti-Semitism.

00:37:10.000 I mean, one way of looking at it, you know, in quite simple terms, is that I don't think

00:37:16.700 anti-Semitism really exists in the political centre, but it has existed on the fringes,

00:37:20.940 the far left, the far right.

00:37:22.700 And as politics becomes, you know, the extremes come into the centre, as they've done with

00:37:27.800 Trump, and, you know, some would argue with the Labour Party, they bring in maybe some

00:37:31.940 tropes that were not used in other more centrist forms of politics.

00:37:38.500 I'm curious about the article that you wrote recently about anti-Semitism.

00:37:41.480 And actually, the interesting thing for me particularly was less anti-Semitism, but more what you said

00:37:46.760 about identity politics in the context of it.

00:37:48.740 And throughout this interview and other things that I've read, I always get the sense that

00:37:53.820 you are kind of, you're a liberal.

00:37:55.360 Yeah.

00:37:55.500 Is that broadly right?

00:37:56.220 Yeah, I'd say so.

00:37:56.880 Well, you know, with occasional reactionary instincts.

00:37:59.720 Repressed.

00:38:00.840 Whenever you read, something that displeases you on the internet.

00:38:02.540 Exactly, it's Latin bill out.

00:38:03.820 Oh, we're all like that, absolutely.

00:38:05.620 And so I was surprised to read something I agree with entirely, which is what you said about

00:38:12.180 identity politics, which is, you said it's a threat, and you said it's illiberal.

00:38:16.540 Can you elaborate on that, and why you think that is?

00:38:18.260 And actually, interestingly as well, how does that fit within the elite circles within which

00:38:23.680 you operate?

00:38:24.360 Sure.

00:38:25.080 Well, I mean, I think that, so why is identity politics illiberal?

00:38:31.620 Because, I mean, I think that liberalism is essentially an individualist creed and says

00:38:36.280 that people should be treated as individuals in the sense that they all have the same rights.

00:38:42.300 We don't say, well, you're part of this group, so you're in a subgroup.

00:38:45.360 If we're citizens of the UK or France or whatever, we have the same rights under the law.

00:38:50.320 But also, I think there's a sense that we are all, to some extent, should be free to

00:38:56.540 choose our own identity.

00:38:58.520 You know, you see it now in sexual politics a lot, that people can say, you know, that

00:39:06.540 they have fluid identities.

00:39:08.580 But even, you know, I was talking mainly in a political context, that I kind of, I've

00:39:15.040 always felt uncomfortable with the idea that people say, oh, you're Jewish, so therefore

00:39:18.520 you'll think this about Israel, you'll think this about that.

00:39:21.180 Well, no, you don't know what I think, actually.

00:39:23.720 And I'm not, I am Jewish, I'm also lots of other things.

00:39:26.120 You know, I'm British, I'm, you know, I have a certain sort of education, I have a certain

00:39:31.180 class background, I have a personality, you know, all sorts of different things.

00:39:36.740 And so I don't want to be...

00:39:38.280 It's almost like you're a whole individual person.

00:39:40.480 Yes, exactly.

00:39:41.780 But, and I think the thing about identity politics is it says, well, the key thing about

00:39:46.200 this person or whatever, it's that they're a member of the Muslim community or the Jewish

00:39:50.340 community or the LGBT community or whatever, and this community we know has this set of

00:39:55.840 views and this is their spokesman, and, you know, that's how we're going to do politics.

00:40:00.600 And I think that, A, I just don't like that way of thought.

00:40:04.420 I also think that it gets potentially dangerous, because I think when you start saying the X group,

00:40:09.820 the Y group, you encourage people to think in communal terms, and therefore to look down

00:40:15.460 on the out group or to fear the out group and say, well, the only people I really trust

00:40:19.360 are members of my group, you know, the other group we're going to have to negotiate with

00:40:23.380 or defeat or something, and that's really dangerous.

00:40:26.800 It's fascinating you said you were talking about, and it's also fascinating you bring

00:40:30.200 up Israel.

00:40:32.200 Going back to anti-Semitism, do you think that Israel's current policies emboldens anti-Semites

00:40:39.460 and sort of gives it a justification?

00:40:42.360 Well, a complicated question, but I think yes and no is the answer to that.

00:40:48.300 I mean, I think that there are, there's a lot of legitimate disquiet, both with the

00:40:55.840 actions of Israel, and actually, interestingly, with the idea of the Jewish state, which I'll

00:40:59.380 come back to in a second.

00:41:00.360 But the actions of Israel, I mean, obviously, it's, if you see kind of the bombardment of

00:41:06.320 Gaza or something, all of our kind of liberalists say, oh my God, this is horrific.

00:41:10.960 You know, they're kind of citizens, you know, individuals, children being killed.

00:41:15.000 It's outrageous.

00:41:15.920 And people get upset about that.

00:41:17.640 But the only reason I sometimes feel uneasy about it is that I think that, you know,

00:41:24.420 if, say, Israel was doing now what the Russian and Syrian air force has been doing in Eastern

00:41:30.400 Ghouta or, you know, did in Aleppo or whatever, London would be in flames.

00:41:34.740 There would be huge demonstrations.

00:41:36.660 People feel very, very strongly about it when it's the Israelis.

00:41:39.200 And if it's the Saudis or the Syrians, you don't even notice. 0.86

00:41:43.520 And you sort of think, well, you know, there's a kind of odd double standard here.

00:41:48.340 And whether that's anti-Semitism or just that people think, in some ways, I think it's partly

00:41:55.480 because they sort of feel that Israel's part of us.

00:41:57.980 I mean, some of it's anti-Semitism.

00:41:59.380 Some of it might be, well, this is a kind of white nation that we're allied with. 0.57

00:42:03.320 I don't know.

00:42:03.740 But there's something odd going on.

00:42:06.600 Then the whole question of, you know, it's a slightly, maybe over-intellectualized way of

00:42:11.120 it.

00:42:11.220 But one of the things that you hear in this whole anti-Semitism debate is people saying,

00:42:14.840 oh, well, you know, it's fine to criticize Israel. 0.99

00:42:16.540 It's not OK to question the existence of a Jewish state.

00:42:19.620 And that's the line.

00:42:22.020 Now, I know what they're getting at.

00:42:23.760 But in a funny way, intellectually, I think it should be OK to question the existence of

00:42:27.160 a Jewish state because it's a state defined by ethnicity rather than individuality, et cetera,

00:42:32.000 et cetera.

00:42:32.960 Maybe that's not OK.

00:42:34.820 And I certainly have Israeli relatives who believe that the ultimate solution is not

00:42:39.840 a two-state solution but a one-state solution in which you have Jews and Palestinians as 0.98

00:42:45.020 co-citizens in this country.

00:42:46.840 And a lot of Zionists would say that is anti-Israeli because it eventually dissolves Israel's identity

00:42:52.500 as a Jewish state.

00:42:53.480 Therefore, it's racist.

00:42:54.560 I don't think it's racist.

00:42:55.340 But I do think personally that it's naive and it could have pretty dangerous consequences

00:43:00.200 because I don't think the two communities are likely to live together in peace, et cetera.

00:43:05.980 So I support a Jewish state for largely pragmatic reasons.

00:43:09.260 I think it's the best way, if you can do it alongside a Palestinian state, of finding some 0.92

00:43:14.060 kind of modus vivendi.

00:43:15.560 But I don't think as an intellectual construct that it's racist even to question the existence

00:43:21.860 of Israel.

00:43:22.380 I do think, however, you know, it gets complicated because some people who do that are anti-Semitic

00:43:27.760 and aren't doing it from a kind of intellectual basis.

00:43:30.260 You know, are we comfortable with the idea of an ethnically-based state?

00:43:34.020 You know, there's something about Israel itself that gets to them.

00:43:37.140 And do you think Trump saying that Jerusalem is now the capital is inflammatory?

00:43:42.920 Or do you think that was the right thing to do?

00:43:45.600 No, I think it's inflammatory, obviously.

00:43:47.240 And it's intended to inflame.

00:43:48.540 You know, Bannon, who was the guy who was behind it, and amusingly is often accused of

00:43:54.960 anti-Semitism because of the people he mixed with, was very, very keen for the Israeli capital

00:44:01.380 to be acknowledged as Jerusalem.

00:44:02.700 That's been a sort of totemic thing for the far right in America or the hard right.

00:44:07.100 And I think, yeah, it's pointless because there's enough grief in that part of the world without

00:44:15.360 stirring it up further.

00:44:16.560 It's a symbolic gesture which will just upset people.

00:44:20.040 So I think it's correct to say that that's a step that has to wait for the ultimate peace

00:44:27.080 settlement, which may never arrive.

00:44:28.980 But it's nonetheless, it's sort of giving Israel the reward for the two-state solution 0.81

00:44:33.720 before the two-state solution happens.

00:44:35.400 So I don't think that's a good idea.

00:44:36.980 I'm curious to come back to the identity politics a bit because I think one of the interesting things,

00:44:40.700 I recently found out I have some Jewish heritage.

00:44:42.740 Oh, I could have told you that.

00:44:45.200 Thanks very much.

00:44:45.920 So literally you send off a little DNA sample.

00:44:49.740 Two weeks later, your Jewish UIQ goes up by about 10 points.

00:44:52.240 It's great. 0.74

00:44:52.520 So I'm curious about it because from an identity politics standpoint, Jews actually don't fit

00:45:00.540 the narrative of identity politics very well because the idea of identity politics is we're

00:45:04.760 all oppressed at different levels.

00:45:06.540 And Jews, I mean historically probably the most oppressed ethnic group ever, and yet they're

00:45:11.560 largely very successful.

00:45:12.780 You're a good example of someone like that, right?

00:45:15.920 Tend to be very intelligent, well-educated, successful financially, right?

00:45:19.420 So that doesn't seem to fit the narrative.

00:45:22.940 And I don't ever hear about anti-Semitism as being part of the things that we need to

00:45:28.520 fight within the identity politics.

00:45:30.900 Well, you're beginning to hear it, aren't you?

00:45:32.480 I mean, in Britain, for example, it's suddenly become an issue.

00:45:36.000 But I mean, yeah, maybe that's a sign of the kind of slightly disturbed political times

00:45:43.720 that we've entered, that this kind of thing is popping up again.

00:45:46.980 And it's interesting, you touched, I mean, the far right, we know because of history and

00:45:53.340 all the rest of it, there have been associates with anti-Semitism.

00:45:56.720 And you mentioned that the far left have, and obviously there's this, at the moment people

00:46:01.200 are talking about whether Labour are anti-Semitic, whether Corbyn is anti-Semitic.

00:46:05.080 How have the far left been anti-Semitic?

00:46:07.020 Okay, well, look, I mean, I think first of all, just from a theoretical level, the thing

00:46:09.800 I argued in the article is that I think the far left are, some of them anyway, drawn to

00:46:15.060 identity politics, you know, that they think in terms of, like, the X community, the Y

00:46:19.540 community.

00:46:20.280 And I think, as I said, that's, in fact, a slightly dangerous way of thinking, because

00:46:24.140 then you can say, well, there's this, and then there's this other group, the Jews, and

00:46:27.520 we can either be, like, pro them or anti them or whatever, but they're this group, you know,

00:46:31.940 that we, and I prefer, actually, to say, you know, there are individuals, some of whom

00:46:37.460 were Jewish, but I wouldn't lump them together as a group.

00:46:42.380 But how is the left anti, in other, in more practical terms?

00:46:46.440 Look, there's been traditionally an anti-capitalist element.

00:46:51.840 That's going back to the 19th century, and some of the times that gets mixed up with anti-Semitism.

00:46:56.880 You can see it, actually, on the right, weird.

00:46:59.360 It's funny, both, the far right have a Jewish capitalist they hate who's George Soros, and

00:47:03.600 the far left have a Jewish capitalist they hate who's the Rockefellers, you know, going 1.00

00:47:07.260 all the way back.

00:47:08.780 But this idea of finance and the sort of network of kind of international network that's all

00:47:13.500 kind of connected to each other.

00:47:15.580 Are you part of that?

00:47:16.800 No, I'm not.

00:47:19.040 But it's funny, I did, yeah, I did once go to a conference where there are a bunch of

00:47:27.960 fairly powerful people, and they're all sitting, weirdly, in alphabetical order.

00:47:31.420 And I was talking to a French academic who said, oh, I hope there's no photograph coming

00:47:36.920 out of this, because I am between Rockefeller and Rumsfeld.

00:47:41.800 But anyway, so, what was it?

00:47:45.440 Sorry, it's terrible.

00:47:47.020 No, but it's, look, and no, and I think the other thing is that, obviously, the far left

00:47:54.720 have taken up Israel as a cause, and as we were just saying, that there are ways of doing

00:47:58.880 that that are sort of completely legitimate.

00:48:02.420 I was going to say kosher, I shouldn't say.

00:48:05.160 And then there are ways of doing that that then slide into sort of crazy conspiracy theories

00:48:10.820 about, you know, all the Jews were born to leave the Twin Towers on 9-11 and that kind

00:48:15.340 of stuff.

00:48:15.600 For example, one of the people that Corbyn unwisely entertained at the House of Commons

00:48:20.760 is somebody who believes that, you know, has put out that theory.

00:48:24.180 So, do you think Corbyn is an anti-Semite?

00:48:28.300 I don't know.

00:48:29.200 I've never met a guy.

00:48:30.080 I mean, I think probably not.

00:48:33.000 But, you know, also, it's a funny thing.

00:48:35.080 You know, what's in people's hearts?

00:48:36.280 It's hard to tell.

00:48:37.180 You know, I was talking to a sort of Jewish friend of mine who said, look, the guy says

00:48:41.380 he's not an anti-Semite.

00:48:42.420 Can we just, like, take his word for it? 0.96

00:48:43.840 You know, if he goes around saying, drive the Jews out, then we sort of know.

00:48:50.300 You know, but if he's not doing that, then fine.

00:48:53.480 You know, you don't have to sort of divine his sentiments.

00:48:57.100 So, I would be inclined to say he's unwise into the company.

00:49:02.120 He has kept the company of people who peddle pretty nasty stuff.

00:49:05.780 But he's not said it himself.

00:49:07.420 All right.

00:49:07.660 We've done enough on the Jews. 1.00

00:49:09.240 Yeah.

00:49:09.560 Yeah.

00:49:11.260 Smoothly done.

00:49:11.920 Mate, I can say that.

00:49:12.900 I'm Jewish now.

00:49:13.440 I can say anything I want.

00:49:15.400 So.

00:49:15.580 Now you'll be rich and successful.

00:49:16.980 Yes.

00:49:17.820 Yes.

00:49:18.100 Highly unlikely, despite my Jewishness.

00:49:21.600 The curious thing for me is we always like to ask at the end of the show what our guests

00:49:26.120 think is the number one issue that everybody should be talking about that no one is talking

00:49:30.080 about.

00:49:30.460 God, it's an unanswerable question.

00:49:32.460 I mean, I think we've, unfortunately, they're all the number one issues that are kind of obvious

00:49:36.200 ones for me.

00:49:37.080 But that's because I've got, I'm lucky in the sense that I write about all the things that

00:49:40.860 are really interesting.

00:49:41.440 I think, you know, Brexit and Trump.

00:49:42.900 I mean, sometimes you think, God, I can't face, like, wading back into that particular

00:49:48.840 sort of cesspool.

00:49:50.360 But, no, I mean, I write about the stuff that I think is interesting.

00:49:54.120 And it's been difficult for me to actually break out of the Trump-Brexit, Trump-Brexit

00:49:59.500 thing, partly because one of the weird things about modern journalism is you know exactly

00:50:05.220 how many people read each article.

00:50:06.560 So you know what readers are interested in.

00:50:09.200 And they're interested in Trump and Brexit, our readers, anyway.

00:50:12.120 And so I did a sort of duty column where I went to Tunisia, which is an interesting country.

00:50:16.460 It's like the last democracy in the Middle East that survived the Arab Spring. 0.59

00:50:21.160 And I thought, OK, I'm going to write this column.

00:50:23.060 It's important.

00:50:23.800 Nobody will read it.

00:50:24.580 I was totally right.

00:50:25.600 Like, nobody will read it.

00:50:28.520 There's no reward for talking about these interesting...

00:50:31.080 No, no.

00:50:31.940 Here's another question, and let me ask you this.

00:50:33.660 Chris, you're one of the first journalists that is coming on our show, and we really appreciate

00:50:37.300 you coming on.

00:50:37.940 Thank you very much.

00:50:39.100 Tell us, what is at its best, what is journalism supposed to be?

00:50:43.100 What is it about?

00:50:45.300 Look, it's hard to answer that question without sounding absurdly pompous.

00:50:49.720 But, look, I think it's about something that we used to sort of take for granted, but it's

00:50:57.340 now increasingly under-challenged.

00:50:58.860 It's just like trying to establish the truth.

00:51:01.860 It's quite important.

00:51:03.660 And that's, you know, and I think that the whole Russian thing is quite an interesting

00:51:08.440 challenge to the truth.

00:51:11.380 Because we think, you know, certainly I mentioned I joined the BBC, and people associate the

00:51:15.480 BBC with objectivity.

00:51:16.840 You know, this guy says this, and this guy says that, and you report both sides.

00:51:20.340 Fair enough.

00:51:20.780 What's wrong with that?

00:51:21.820 I think the Russians have played that rather cleverly.

00:51:24.220 So they say, like I would say, this microphone's black.

00:51:27.420 And they would say, no, no, the microphone is actually white.

00:51:29.840 And you should report that I say it's white, and also that it's possibly yellow and green.

00:51:34.400 And I said, no, no, it's black. 1.00

00:51:35.480 Look, we can all say it's black. 0.94

00:51:36.400 They said, no, no, no.

00:51:37.180 It's two sides to every story.

00:51:38.680 Exactly, yeah.

00:51:39.400 Question more.

00:51:40.280 So you throw up so many kind of crazy theories that you can kind of drown the truth.

00:51:46.560 You can cover the truth.

00:51:47.880 And so we're having to rethink, like, well, what is it about actually reporting correctly

00:51:54.820 and sticking up for the truth?

00:51:57.120 Is it just saying, well, the Russians say this, and the Brits say that, and, like, you

00:52:00.800 know, make your own mind.

00:52:01.740 But is that even possible, Gideon, because we've talked throughout this interview about

00:52:04.860 your own views on the world.

00:52:06.580 Yeah, yeah.

00:52:06.820 Well, I mean, you know, and of course, I'm paradoxically in the opinion journalism thing.

00:52:10.540 So I'm, and that I had to learn in a funny way, because I started coming from a conventional

00:52:16.500 journalistic background where you kind of kept your own views out of it correctly.

00:52:20.360 And then suddenly I was on the op-ed pages, and they actually had to tell me at a certain

00:52:23.920 point, you know, tap me on the shoulder and say, look, you know, your analysis is all

00:52:26.880 very interesting, but you're meant to have an opinion.

00:52:28.560 You know, can you say something?

00:52:30.060 And I had sort of, and it's not, and some people that's very natural to, you know, kind

00:52:34.040 of, you know, your peers, Morgans, et cetera, who are just mouthy and love to tell you.

00:52:38.520 And it didn't come very naturally to me, and in a way still doesn't, but I had to kind

00:52:42.060 of teach myself to, to say something.

00:52:45.320 And even if I didn't, I never say anything I don't believe, but I will sometimes put it

00:52:50.560 more strongly than I would if we were just chatting in the pub, you know, you make an

00:52:53.900 argument.

00:52:55.140 And, and I think that's part of, for me, that's part of the role.

00:52:58.800 And I don't particularly, well, obviously I prefer people say that's brilliant.

00:53:03.000 I totally agree.

00:53:04.060 But I realize that part of the game is, or part of the role is to put an opinion out

00:53:10.520 there.

00:53:10.660 And then people can say, well, I read that.

00:53:12.900 I disagree.

00:53:13.920 But it, but it sort of makes them frame their own view.

00:53:16.120 It sort of contributes to part debate.

00:53:18.240 And that, that's part of the, for me, that's part of the kind of odd bit of journalism that

00:53:22.740 I'm in.

00:53:23.000 Well, that's exactly what we're trying to do here is bring in people with different opinions

00:53:26.160 who can put it in an elaborate way for a long time and actually have a chance to, you

00:53:31.440 know, explain what they think, you know.

00:53:32.780 So thank you very much for coming in.

00:53:34.240 It's been an absolute pleasure.

00:53:35.440 And we look forward to putting this out.

00:53:37.100 And before we finish, is there anything that you would like to promote, Gideon?

00:53:40.320 Would you like to, your Twitter handle, for instance, or is it a book?

00:53:43.380 There are enough lunatics following me on Twitter. 0.61

00:53:45.900 No, yeah. 0.88

00:53:46.900 People want to buy my book.

00:53:47.840 It's called Easternization. 0.91

00:53:49.040 So it's been out a couple of years.

00:53:51.080 And you also wrote a book about zero-sum politics as well, did you not, in 2014?

00:53:54.840 Yeah.

00:53:54.940 So look, I...

00:53:55.840 You don't agree with it anymore?

00:53:56.840 No, I do.

00:53:57.460 I mean, it's sort of, that was the one I wrote just after the financial crisis saying

00:54:01.540 that, you know, there's going to be trouble politically.

00:54:03.900 And I think that was broadly right, actually.

00:54:05.800 And if people want to follow you on Twitter or Instagram, Konstantin, where would they

00:54:09.160 look for you?

00:54:09.700 At Konstantin Kishin.

00:54:10.740 I've got lots of Russian bots following me.

00:54:12.660 Yeah.

00:54:13.520 And I'm at Failing Human on Twitter and Instagram.

00:54:16.860 And also, if the Russian bots are tracking you, I just want to say I disagree with everything

00:54:20.800 Konstantin.

00:54:21.960 And we have no personal relationship of any sort.

00:54:24.720 Thank you, Vladimir.

00:54:25.540 Thank you, Vladimir.

00:54:33.700 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - April 23, 2018

Triggernometry - Ep. 1 Gideon Rachman

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