Below are selected responses from Rory Stewart appearance on The Exchange with Oli Dugmore.
Oli Dugmore: You used the phrase “extreme political evil”. Looking around the world right now, where do you see this expression?
Rory Stewart: Well, the word bad means many, many different things, but to me, one of the most basic aspects is carelessness. It is a reckless, casual disregard for consequences. Now, that’s how we can be in our private lives, you know, the way we treat a romantic partner, causing chaos, sleeping with a lot of people, not caring about the misery it causes them, right?
Or it could be what I see in Donald Trump, which is a strange, complete disregard for thinking about consequences. In which case, he gets out of bed in the morning and thinks, “Ah, Israel is going to bomb them anyway, why don’t I join in and bomb Iran?” And it overturns all the economies of the Gulf. I mean, the UAE, Dubai will struggle to recover in the next ten years from what it has done. He has raised oil prices, he has crippled the economies of Europe, he means that very poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, will not be able to access fertilizer because he has raised the price of oil. He has unleashed misery on Iran itself. And my guess is that he just doesn’t care. So, to me, the evil in Trump is just a kind of sense of a kind of brilliant, charming recklessness.
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If you consider Trump on one side and then the Ayatollah on the other, many people will tell you, if we were to categorize one or indeed both as evil, that they would start with the supreme leader of Iran.
So the Iranian regime has killed tens of thousands of people in January and February of this year. People machine-gunned in the streets, snipers on the roofs. He has been running prisons with political prisoners for decades. The revolution itself was born in a storm of violence and murder. He propagated an Iran-Iraq war in which millions of people, including many young people, were sent to their deaths through minefields. And this makes the whole thing more brutal and evil because it reinforces it with a particular Islamic nationalist doctrine and runs proxy militias. It’s a really disturbing, horrible regime.
And it reminds you of the horrors of totalitarian regimes around the world. This is very reminiscent of the way Putin has run many things in Russia. It’s not necessarily shooting people in the street, but it’s definitely massive repression, political prisoners, corruption, and actually international murder. Of course there are echoes of the way Gaddafi ran Libya, the way Saddam Hussein ran Iraq, the way the leader of North Korea runs North Korea. And China has its fair share of extermination, murder, political prisoners, etc. So everything is completely true. And I think what’s so troubling is that although Iran has basically been in that situation for nearly 50 years and was preceded by a Shah whose secret police killed thousands of people, what one is fighting when one looks at the United States is a country that presented itself in a completely different way, that did not tell the world we are a theocratic democracy, but we symbolize liberal rights, we symbolize authoritarian rights. we symbolize the rules-based international order, we symbolize progress. So yes, there are different forms of evil.
There are moments in history that inform what is happening now. Would you talk a little bit about them?
One basic idea shared by the Iranians, Chinese and Russians is that the West is determined to disrupt them. That America has only one objective in its mind since the 1970s and that Israel has only had one idea in its mind since the 1990s, which is the destruction of their regime and their extermination.
And the belief that if they give an inch, they will be wiped out. They will have learned from the experience of the last 18 months that their mistake was not causing havoc last time. That they were very measured in their response. There was almost a moment when the initial Israeli strikes were happening where Iran’s response was to say, “in 24 hours, we’re going to send a missile. Are you ready? Are you ready? Here it comes.” Indeed, although Hezbollah fired rockets and led to a situation where the Israelis fled northern Israel, they only fired a fraction of the rockets they had. They probably had a hundred thousand missiles that they could have fired, they fired a few thousand.
What they will have concluded is that instead of taking credit from the US or Israel for their deterrence and measured deterrence… Israel and the US are no longer playing those games. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s restraint by saying, “Well, you’re a bunch of scumbags. You didn’t use your missiles fast enough, and we’re going to come and kill you all, and we’re going to kill 1,500 of their leaders.” And then, when Iran didn’t respond aggressively to the initial attacks, Israel concluded, “Well, you’re a bunch of pussies and you’re toothless, so we’re going to hit you even harder and keep hitting you.” And in the end, they reached a stage where Israel and the US were signaling that they were going to kill the entire leadership of the regime, overthrow the regime. They signaled that they could arm the Kurds to invade. At that point, there is no leverage left.
At that point, what alternative would the regime really feel, if the regime wants to survive, other than to demonstrate that if you attack Iran there are consequences. So let’s raise your global oil price. Let’s attack the Gulf. Let’s cause chaos and show people that you can’t just attack us and get away with it. All the people who showed restraint, some of those people have actually been killed. The people demand restraint.
Much of this has centered around Iran’s efforts, or lack thereof, to pursue its own sustainable nuclear weapon. One would predict the events of the last few weeks – you look at North Korea – if you’re on that axis of evil, as George Bush describes it, you might say, well, they don’t go for it.
No, exactly. There will be a huge acceleration of people getting nuclear weapons because they will conclude that it is the only thing that can protect you. And that it really starts with Gaddafi. A great deal of effort was made to tell Gaddafi that if he gave up his nuclear program, we would lift the sanctions and he could become a friend of the West. He gives up his nuclear program and then a few years later we invade and kill him. The same with Saddam Hussein, basically, who was put under a lot of pressure to give up his nuclear programs and his chemical weapons programs. He actually turned out to have completely abandoned his chemical weapons programs under international pressure. And the only result was that we killed them. Ukraine, a very similar situation, was encouraged to give up its nuclear weapons and it actually had them, unlike the others. She physically had nuclear weapons, she gave them up because they were told they would be safer if they didn’t have the weapons. What happens? Russia invades.
So it’s not just countries like Iran that will try to develop nuclear programs. Saudi Arabia will try to develop a nuclear program. European states will try to develop nuclear programs. I mean, who wouldn’t develop a nuclear program if you’re in a world where Trump and Netanyahu can literally get out of bed in the morning, not make international legal arguments, not make any arguments to Congress, not bother to consult with their allies, and destabilize an entire region, plunging the global economy into a terrible mess with no due process, no legal thinking, no legal argument. Why wouldn’t you break away from those alliances and try to deploy your own weapon?
Just go back to Islam for a second. I feel like there is an understanding that is characterized by empathy that is actually an understanding of that world. And when I look across the British national political discourse, whether it’s Nick Timothy saying that Muslims praying in Trafalgar Square during Ramadan is some kind of act of domination, whether it’s Reform or other radical right parties in Britain pledging to do things like ban the burqa, I think a lot of the way our politics engages with Muslims and Islam is bigotry. And while there are obvious downsides and consequences, not least for Muslims living in Britain, it is now increasingly in the clear national interest, if Western activity in Iran were characterized by more intelligence, understanding and sensitivity, it seems to me that our national interest could be better served. And I would just invite your reflections on the kind of hostility that exists in much of our politics toward people of this faith, people of this religion, who live here.
Yes. I think we should be very clear that this is basically racism. I mean, basically the AfD in Germany or the far right in Britain, or all those people on social media who talk about Judeo-Christian values and say, I have nothing against black people I just don’t like Islam, are basically racist. Basically what they are trying to do is drive hundreds of thousands, millions of people out of their country. Some of the AfD leadership are very clear about this. They talk about re-emigration. You are a Muslim, you will be deported from Germany.
It is the most amazing madness. This idea that somehow Islam itself is some kind of fundamentally bad religion and other religions are fundamentally good is completely insane. World history is littered with Christians doing terrible things, even Buddhism has a kind of radical edge, Hindu nationalists doing bad things, religious Zionists in Israel doing terrible things. All of them, if you are an extremist, appeal to some strange scriptural justification. But the point is that extremism precedes scriptural justification. It’s not driven by scriptural justification, is it?
I have spent much of my life living in Muslim countries. My lived experience is of extremely generous, dignified, thoughtful and empathetic societies that don’t begin to resemble the kind of ideas white non-Muslims develop. It’s partly just pure ignorance. It is not very different from how our experience with other forms of racism. The kind of ways people thought of black people when they hadn’t met any black people or the kind of ways people thought of people who were gay until they actually had some gay friends. A lot of it is simply that they simply don’t know any Muslims. They did not understand her lived experience. They don’t understand it. Now add to that the way it is being weaponized around the world. It’s really disturbing, deeply disturbing.
(See also: Donald Trump is my old friend – but he’s lost the plot)
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