Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I'm Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator of the Financial Times. This week's podcast is about what the election of Donald Trump means for Great Britain. My guest is Sir Alex Younger. the former head of MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service. He ran MI6 during the first Trump presidency. But can the traditional ties between Britain and the US really survive a second Trump administration?
If every time Trump appoints someone he wouldn't necessarily invite to dinner to a position and you have a fit of the vapours, we are not going to last very long. There is a lot to worry about about what people like Tulsi Gabbard says. There are a lot of obstacles, though, between her and actually influencing the machine, which is so important to us that we shouldn't understate. That was Sir Alex discussing Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's unconventional choice.
as Director of US National Intelligence, DNI. All this is happening against a backdrop of Russian advances in the Ukraine war and at a time when relations between the West and China are increasingly tense. But I began my conversation with Sir Alex by asking about the implications for Britain of Trump's election. I think, having been through this before, that it's important not to...
centre the entire conversation around one man, however idiosyncratic and now unrestrained he might be. I think that to be philosophical for a moment, there is a contest going on between the sort of Yalta view of the world. Yalta being the treaty where big states were given the right to order the affairs of small states. And the Helsinki view of the world, Helsinki being the point at which states were given their rights after the excesses of the Second World War, regardless of size.
Britain was fully paid up to the spheres of influence. Might is right world. Let's be obvious about this. But our recent prosperity has been invested in the existence of the Helsinki world. A strong... policed, rules-based system that does allow globalization to proceed in a way that's made all of our lives better.
Trump's election crystallizes that tension. He's a Yalta man through and through. You mean deals between big powers, cut the world up? Over the heads of small powers, spheres of influence. When you listen to the phrase, America first. Who else can you imagine uttering a phrase like that? Can you imagine Starmer going Britain first or Schultz going Germany first? No. Can you imagine Putin talking about Russia first? You can almost hear it.
Can you imagine Xi Jinping? The same. Xi Jinping's stated endgame for the sort of righteous world order is one where states are in a position untrammeled to pursue their interests. uninterfered with by global policemen or hegemons. This is a common worldview, and it's all fundamentally inimicable to Britain's interests. So I think that is where the fight is. It's much bigger than Trump. And I think that actually there are...
quite a lot of levers for us to pull. So I was going to ask, if Trump is pushing a worldview that we haven't held for 40 years and that, as you say, is inimical to our interests, what do we do? Do we get with the program and say... well, this is the way the world's going and we've got to adapt to it, or do we fight for this apparently dying vision of the world?
I think the reason we have a problem is the way the world is going. And I think this is a maths thing rather than a political philosophy thing. The reality is since 1945. The US's share of global GDP has halved and that wealth and influence has gone east and not just to China, but it's dispersed away from the established.
democracies and that's making the difference for us between a unipolar world and a multipolar world. It is a far more complex environment characterized by real ideological conflict and we've got to work with that. I think the problem is, though, that as the East has got richer, the inequality that used to exist between blocs has been replaced by inequality within blocs and within countries. So at the same time that we've lost...
relative influence as the mature democracies, the experience of living in the bottom half of those democracies has got worse. And that in turn has undermined consensus and political will. So it's a double whammy. It's true our power is less than it was, but also our willingness to dispose it is less. The start point surely has got to be us and the re-establishment in our own minds.
of the benefits of the way that we ran the world. And that's a political leadership thing. I think a race to the bottom is not going to end well, by contrast. I mean, I take your point that Trump is the product of bigger forces and represents bigger ideas, but they're also...
quite specific potential problems posed by some of his appointments. And Tulsi Gabbard, who's been made Director of National Intelligence, has been accused by people in the United States of being a Russian asset. And whether she's that or not, she's certainly quite... pro-Putin. She's met with and praised Bashar al-Assad. I mean, you ran the British intelligence services. If that was your American counterpart, what do you do?
Look, could I presume to give you a tip on personal resilience if you find yourself running one of the best intelligence services in the world? And that is to focus on the things you can change. not the things you can't. If every time Trump appoints someone who you wouldn't necessarily invite to dinner to a position and you have a fit of the vapors, we are not going to last very long. There is a lot to worry about about what people like Tulsi Gabbard says.
There are a lot of obstacles though between her and actually influencing the machine, which is so important to us that we shouldn't understate. We have a lot of experience. and very broad-based set of connectivity with the United States that we now need to use to make our argument and insulate the effects of... these wild conspiracy theories. These are things we can do. It's good for your mental health to focus on the things you can do rather than just lamenting.
what I think is actually designed to be a pretty provocative set of appointments. And I'm not convinced, by the way, that the Senate will play along with a lot of them. as i understand it from the outside there's very intense intelligence sharing between the british and the americans if there's somebody like that i don't want to personalize it to her but somebody you don't entirely trust at the top
Are you going to be able to say, well, we're just business as usual, we'll show them everything, we'll trust everything? Look, we've been here before, and the reality is we have common cause. Both, say, the CIA and SIS, MI6, are ultimate. allegiances to our national leadership and our people, but we have very significant common cause.
in what we do. And what we do is we ask people to take risks in order to acquire the information necessary to keep our people safe. So it's close to a sacred obligation that that intelligence is respected. And of course, there's a practical issue that if you don't do that, you won't be in business for very long. That discipline applies just as much to a US agency as to a British agency.
What that meant in practice, I found last time, is you could have a set of very good conversations about how we maintain the confidence and every opportunity, and this isn't just with the United States, it's with other countries as well. emphasize that the intelligence channel is not there to be politicized it is the area where we have frank exchanges of course but also where we can really rely on what is being told to each other
free of political atmospherics or colour. That all hung together well last time, though I appreciate it's a different Trump we've got on this occasion. But if I was still in the job, that would very much be my approach.
Again, I appreciate this as a hypothetical, but let's say your successors begin to worry that that's no longer the case, that things are leaking. What can you do about it? Because it seems to me that British security and British intelligence has been... intertwined with the United States for so long that trying to disentangle it is almost unthinkable.
Yeah, I think you've answered your own question there, Gideon. I mean, it's hypothetical in any case, and I think there's a lot of actual stuff that we get in the way, but the idea that we would unilaterally... we draw off an arrangement from which we've been such a significant net beneficiary seems to me extremely unlikely. The sort of tactical issue would be to construct affairs, including our ability to tell people truthfully that we could keep secrets.
in a way that maintain the integrity of our business. But as I say, that is our imperative share by our US partners as well. And thinking more broadly about the special relationship, you know, it's quite fashionable in Britain to say, oh, you know, it's just something the British talk about. It's not real. and trying to write about
sort of international affairs, I've come to the opposite conclusion, is quite real, but the center of it is the intelligence sharing and the nuclear weapons. It is real, but I bridle when I hear it couched in sentimental terms, you know, until 1917. America defined itself pretty well in opposition to everything that we stood for as the former colonial power. So I don't think we should get too dewy-eyed about this, even if subsequently...
Specifically, the common experience we have of serving together all over the world against joint adversaries is an incredibly important binder. But ultimately, it's the bigger partner. There have been times where I've been tempted to make the mistake of thinking this is a sentimental relationship, and I've discovered there's not a lot to play on there. So it's about our value proposition and making sure that we've got one.
I think the intelligence space is manifestly an area where that is true. We're the much smaller partner, but we have a set of capabilities that are highly complementary to those in the United States, which they value. Defence also, but you need to recognise that our hard power is now so diminished that we need to be quite careful about claims we make in being a peer to the United States across the board. I think that sounds a bit vainglorious, if I'm to be honest.
But I'd make a wider point, Gideon. I think if you look more broadly at the strengths of Britain... enjoys in the technology space, in the life sciences space, in the creative industry space, in the financial services space. If you look at these gentlemen, we have a profoundly services based economy.
There's a huge commonality. And at the middle of that, you've got the language, you've got the education, you've got the human capital. These are actually big things, and I think they have driven our... prosperity quite as much as some kind of amnostrum about the specialness of anything. I remember a long time ago having a conversation with a now-retired diplomat, I think he was running the Foreign Office at the time, Sir John Kerr, and he said...
You know, the central proposition of my working life has been that we do not have to choose between Europe and the United States. We need both. And then in 2016, we Brexited. What was your view of how Brexit's playing out? Well, look, I wasn't a fan, and I wasn't a fan of Brexit for the same reason as I'm not a fan of attempts to dismember the United Kingdom. And I speak essentially as a GO.
political foot soldier. I'll leave the economics to you guys. The bottom line is that the sort of existential adversaries we face in the shape of Putin and potentially Xi Jinping When they look at the collective West, the thing they don't like and fear and respect the most is the quality of the teamwork and alliances that we possess.
And as big countries, they yearn for a different world where all states are on their own. It's the Yalta world. And big states have an advantage in cowing smaller ones. They just love this stuff. I knew that instinctively. I don't think I ever saw an intelligence report saying it, but it was blindingly obvious to me as we went through this process. And that is just, to my mind, axiomatically a problem.
Now, as I say, there are lots of other reasons why people advocate Brexit. What I would want now is for us to do a cool analysis, recognise that Europe has changed out of all recognitions. recognize that our circumstances have changed, recognize that the US has changed, and get into the serious business, which historically we've been quite good at, by the way.
of arbitrage and trying to work out ways in which we can grab the opportunity that exists in this situation. I think if we allow ourselves to get into a... binary situation, then, you know, our diplomats have failed. I'm quite sure, by the way, they would recognize this task. But the last thing we want to be is put in a place where it's either or. Thinking about Brexit a bit more, I mean...
In a previous discussion, you used a phrase that really interested me. You said, Brexit has really diminished our influence and it was intended to. I wondered who you thought intended it to. I think there was, you know, if I'm to get... personal here, a sort of weird fixation with a romanticized view of Britain's past centered around Francis Drake and Elizabethan buccaneers that had us somehow untrammeled.
pirating and trading our way through all of this uncertainty and i think there was an element of nihilism which had us leaving whatever without a plan there was no plan and creating a situation where we at the risk of being completely marginalised, had to pivot towards a specific type of future Britain. The sort of Singapore on Thames model is maybe an exaggeration, but it was, I think, an undeclared attempt to completely re-engineer our society. Now, in some ways...
I think that's fine if that's what you want to do. And it's a legitimate aspiration. But don't go around driving a bus implying that we can cut ourselves off from our biggest trading partner and still have a sort of European economy with lots of tax and spend going on. That's what the bus said. That was the cake and eat it. That was dishonest.
If they popped up and said, listen, the whole thing is dying, the corporate state is dying, we've got to re-engineer, make the state smaller, invest in the things we're really good at, etc. then at least it would have been honest. And at least when we came through it, there would have been a plan. But there was no real debate about that. But I want to be really clear. I don't think those aspirations are intrinsically illegitimate. That was a perfectly reasonable view of the future.
But you need to have a conversation about it. Yeah. And a moment I remember in that whole campaign was when... Faisal Islam, the journalist, said to David Cameron, well, you talked about this being an issue of war and peace. So when we Brexit, when does the Third World War break out? And everybody laughed in the studio. I mean, we're not at the Third World War yet, but it...
It does occur to me that maybe we did underestimate the extent to which Brexit was part of a general destabilization of the international order. But I think there's a risk now that we underestimate the agency that that gives us. So if you look at what's about to go down in Ukraine, the... The UK has a disproportionate interest and capacity to help influence the outcome there, such that even the most dyed in the world ideologue, either in London or in European capitals, cannot ignore.
Europe has been, I think, completely redefined by the rise of Vladimir Putin and actually the relatively positive nature of European response to this, completely re-engineered in a way that makes the value proposition for Britain. And at the same time, for reasons I've already discussed with you, I think the governments of some big European countries feel a real legitimacy problem. So this is the point where we reinsert ourselves into that conversation.
Because Europe can suddenly see the utility of having Britain back. That argument, I think, exists in its own right. It's in our security benefits to do that, and it's in theirs. But I also think we need to sort of rethink how we work with Europe. And to do that, we need, as the UK, to work out what we are and what we are for.
For some reason, the last government had an aversion to industrial policy, which I never understood. Everyone else has got one, including now America. Can we please think about what Britain has that works, that we can double down on, what we want to protect? perhaps abandon this sort of fetishism with high-vis vests and shovels and various niche industries. If we do that...
then I think we find that we get quite a positive conversation going with the European Union because it's not just about the barriers to trade. It's about a whole load of different stuff. And I think adroit politicians can stay away from third rail issues in an environment where...
it's really apparent to all of us the benefits of closer integration. And nor do I think this needs necessarily to be in tension with where the United States are pushing us. As I've already said, we want to be quite careful here because... The US are going to be very focused on the integrity of their tariffs and the perception that the trading nations are creating backdoors that undermine them. We really need to have our eyes open on this stuff. You mentioned Ukraine and Putin.
The war's obviously unfolding, maybe about to intensify indeed. But is it your impression generally that the Ukrainians are losing? Putin certainly thinks that he is winning, and that's happening territorial. The reason I hesitate to answer your question unambiguously, Gideon, is what price? I mean, he's probably losing between 1,000 and 1,000.
1,500 killed or wounded every day. And he has had to re-optimize the Russian economy for war, which is the reason he's winning. But think of the price longer term to the structure. of Russia and his people's broader experience. Now, he doesn't care about those things. He's a dictator, but it's not sustainable. in the very long term. His estimation, though, is he's got more patients than we have. And in that respect, I regret so. I think you're right.
He actually is now well incentivized just to keep going. And don't forget the scale of the sacrifices he made are such that he really does have to come home with something. And my worry about the plan, insofar as we understand it from Team Trump... is that land for peace misses the point it's actually not about land this war putin was super clear right at the beginning it's not about land it's about sovereignty it's about whether ukraine actually exists as a western country
which Putin has made clear is inimicable to Russian security fundamentally. That's where the battle is. If we've got diplomatic capital with Trump's team, we need to be explaining. It's not so much about the land swap. I think it's going to happen. I think we need to suck it up. It's about what the residual Ukraine consists of and the extent to which we can support it or the extent to which we've signed away its status as an independent country. And if...
it ends up as not an independent country in Russia's sphere of influence, whether or not it's actually physically incorporated, but dominated from Moscow, not in the Western sphere. What are the implications after that? You've watched Putin over a period, and there's now a debate going on in the West where some people, we had a senior French politician coming in saying, Putin will stop there. He's exhausted because of the reasons he mentioned. He's lost a lot of people.
It'll be bad, but there's no real threat to NATO. But there's another school that thinks, actually, there would be a threat to NATO. What do you think? Well, I'm not a huge fan of the idea of trusting anything Putin says. I think that we should not overstate the situation. The Russian army is completely knackered. It's performed risibly. It will take it some years to regenerate. But I think also this, that Putin is a sole source of legitimacy with his people.
rests against his analysis that Russia is permanently threatened by the West, is created in opposition to the West. Russia's future lies in defying that in concert with other autocratic nations. And he's going to keep going. We tried this, remember. So I would say to your French colleague, because France was the lead, we did the Minsk.
Accord. Do you remember to try and avert this war? That was what he's talking about, giving Russia what it wanted in return for it going away. Well, what happened next? I think, you know, we've got our children to think about here. Is it a real responsible basis for security policy to somehow assume that this guy is going to change his behavior? But also, Europe is 10 times larger than Russia in economic terms.
We've been negligent with our military-industrial complex. But if we actually decide to build up these capabilities, no one is going to have to give up their Netflix subscription. We can do this. I'll come back to what we need to do in a second, but just... for a moment, on Putin himself. He is a former intelligence operator. In fact, I think he said, you never really leave the intelligence services. That's what formed him. When you see the way he behaves, do you see that...
legacy in the way he thinks and the way he operates. I don't think he's as good a spy as he thinks he is. But in any case, a core to his job would have been the creation of instrumental relationships. You know, fundamentally, interactions aren't... about strategy, they're about tactics, and they're about leveraging the influence that you have over another person. In that circumstance, I think it generally rewards you if you thought hard about the psychological profile of your interlocutor.
and the most sympathetic way in which you can present yourself. And he's clearly done that. So you think he's able to manipulate Donald Trump? He understands Donald Trump? Well, I think it takes two to be manipulated, but he's certainly giving it his best shot. Right. I mean, you obviously think the Russian threat is not going away. You say that we can do it. Do you see any sign that we in Europe are going to really build ourselves up in security terms, particularly if...
We have a Russian threat to the East and a less interested America to the West. I am worried about it because I was at the Munich Security Conference, as I'm sure you were, Gideon, in the spring. And the reason I've tried not to personalize this around Trump is it was all about Trump. There's been a reality for quite a long time that Europe's going to own the Ukraine problem. There is a reality that we can organise effectively to deal with it.
but not if we just kind of assume someone else is going to sort it out for us. And by the way, America's willingness to remain engaged will depend in any case on our willingness to do more. I'd also say in a shout out for my world that... Putin is appearing to be an increasing fan of horizontal escalation. So in other words, the war isn't just about...
what's going on on the battlefield. It's about increasingly bringing the fight across the board in terms of subversion and disinformation and cyber and all of that. Sabotage as well. Yeah, and that is a close in and early. challenge to our integrity as democracies. And if that can't focus our minds and get us working together, we have the tools, we will have excellent security services, there's good relationships, but something's got to change. This is very different.
to the 30 years that we've had and the things we've been able to get used to. Obviously, sitting in Europe, Russia's a great preoccupation. Should we be worrying just as much about China or is that somebody else's problem? I think the whole lesson of the Ukraine thing is that nothing is somebody else's problem. Certainly Putin's closer. But if you were to ask me, what is the thing that will most influence your children's future? Then I would say...
The question of essentially who runs the digital world, China or the West? Is our digital internet future one that's organized top-down, the Chinese model, or bottom-up, the Western model? Actually think about what it would mean if we default to a position where we've lost our innovation and technology edge over a country like China.
It would be a disaster. We just wouldn't have a choice and we wouldn't have a security and we wouldn't have privacy and increasingly we wouldn't have prosperity. I think that we've got a huge amount in the West in terms of our innovative. But I think we're far too casual about the inroads that are being made. I'm not a decoupler. I'm not crying out some...
need to have a Cold War with China. I can see that we have got to maintain a constructive relationship in the areas we can. But can we not be complacent about essentially a mercantilist power replacing? some of our really fundamental critical national infrastructure. If you're asking me about my hierarchy of concerns, that's right at the top. You were in charge though when the 5G decision was made, I think.
And for a long time, Britain looked like it was going to give some of that critical infrastructure to a Chinese firm. Did your view of that evolve? Because Britain seemed to suddenly flip and decide no. Yeah, and you're punching on a bruise here, because I wander around London and, you know, the signal's rubbish.
rant and then I realized that this is one of the consequences but I was involved in that decision and I think it was the correct one and American pressure was justified except in that it only did half of what we need it's all very well us saying we don't want
Chinese technology. But can we think again? And I think we get back to industrial policy about what we do to stimulate reasonable alternatives. And that is the bit that's missing. And it's one of the things that worries me most in the technology space. is still a profoundly and fundamentally competitive environment as between Europe and America. I think Europe has become completely obsessed about regulating something that it doesn't even do anymore.
And I think, frankly, the power of tech platforms in the United States is not sustainable. There's a whole set of issues there. But this is, I think, where the real strategic argument lies. And so the 5G was, you know, it was one thing. I mean, it's a much broader issue. That was Sir Alex Younger, former head of MI6, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening, and please join me again next week.
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