The following are selected answers from Rory Stewart’s appearance on The Exchange with Oli Dugmore.
Oli Dugmore: You’ve used the phrase “extreme political evil.” Looking around the world now, where do you see that finding its expression?
Rory Stewart: Well, the word evil means many, many different things, but for me, one of the most fundamental aspects is carelessness. It’s a reckless, casual disregard for consequences. Now, that could be us in our own private lives, you know, the way we treat a romantic partner, causing chaos, sleeping with lots of people, not caring for the misery it causes them, right?
Or it could be what I see in Donald Trump, which is a whimsical, complete disregard for thinking through consequences. In this case, he gets out of bed in the morning and he thinks, “Ah, Israel’s gonna bomb them anyway, why don’t I join in and we’ll bomb Iran?” And he upends all the economies of the Gulf. I mean, UAE, Dubai will struggle to recover in the next ten years from what he’s done. He has driven up oil prices, he’s crippled the economies of Europe, he will mean that very poor farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, will not be able to access fertiliser because he’s driven up the oil price. He has unleashed misery on Iran itself. And my guess is he just doesn’t care. So for me, evil in Trump is just a sort of sense of a sort of slick, charming recklessness.
If you consider Trump on the one hand and then the ayatollah on the other, many people will say to you, if we were to categorise one or indeed both of them 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 this year. Machine gunned people in the streets, snipers on roofs. It has been running prisons with political prisoners for decades. The revolution itself was born in a flurry of violence and killing. It propagated an Iran-Iraq War in which millions of people, including a lot of young men, were sent to their deaths through minefields. And it makes the whole thing more brutal and sinister because it reinforces it with a particular Islamist nationalist doctrine and it runs proxy militias. It’s a genuinely disturbing, horrifying regime.
And it’s reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian regimes all around the world. It’s very reminiscent of the way that Putin has run a lot of things in Russia. He’s not necessarily shooting people in the streets, but it’s definitely massive repression, political prisoners, corruption and actually assassination internationally. It’s certainly got echoes of the way Gaddafi ran Libya, the way Saddam Hussein ran Iraq, the way that the North Korean leader runs North Korea. And China’s got its fair record of, exterminations, killings, political prisoners, etc. So it’s all completely true. And I guess what’s so disturbing is that although Iran has essentially been in that situation for nearly 50 years and was preceded by a Shah whose secret police killed thousands of people, what one’s struggling with when one’s looking at the United States is a country that presented itself in a completely different way, that did not say to the world we are a theocratic authoritarian state, but instead we symbolise liberal democracy, we symbolise rights, we symbolise constitutions, we symbolise rules-based international order, we symbolise progress. So yeah, there are different forms of evil.
There are moments in history that inform what’s happening now. Would you talk about them a little bit?
A fundamental idea is shared by the Iranians, the Chinese and the Russians, which is that the West is determined to screw them over. That America has had only one objective in its mind since the 1970s and that Israel has had only one idea in its mind since the 1990s, which is to destroy their regime and exterminate them.
And the belief that if they give an inch, they will be wiped out. They will have concluded from the experience of the last 18 months that their mistake was that they didn’t cause 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 sending a missile over. Are you ready? Are you ready? Here it comes.” Where actually, although Hezbollah fired rockets and led to a situation where Israelis left Northern Israel, they fired only a fraction of the rockets they had. They probably had a hundred thousand rockets they could have fired, they fired a few thousand.
What they will have concluded is that instead of getting credit from the US or Israel for restraining themselves and measured deterrence… Israel and the US are no longer playing by those games. Israel responded to the restraint of Hezbollah by saying, “Well, you’re a bunch of suckers. You didn’t use your missiles quickly enough, and we’re gonna come and kill you all and kill 1,500 of their leadership.” And then when Iran didn’t respond aggressively to the initial strikes, Israel concluded, “Well, you’re a bunch of suckers and you’re toothless, so we’ll hit you even harder and we’ll keep hitting you.” And ultimately, they got to a stage where Israel and the US was signalling that they were going to kill all the leadership of the regime, topple the regime. They signalled that they might arm the Kurds to invade. At that point, there’s no leverage left.
At that point, what alternative really would it feel like there was for the regime, if the regime wants to survive, other than to demonstrate that if you attack Iran there are consequences. Hence let’s drive up 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 asking for restraint.
Much of this has centred around Iranian attempts or lack thereof to pursue their own viable nuclear weapon. One would anticipate the events of recent weeks – you look at North Korea – if you’re on that axis of evil, as George Bush describes it, you can say, well, they’re not being subject to this.
No, exactly. There will be a huge acceleration of people getting nuclear weapons because they will conclude it’s the only thing that can defend you. And that this begins really with Gaddafi. A huge amount of effort was put into telling Gaddafi that if he gave up on his nuclear programme, we would lift sanctions and he could become a friend of the West. He gives up on his nuclear programme and then a couple years later we invade and kill him. Ditto with Saddam Hussein, basically, who was put under huge pressure to step away from his nuclear programmes and from his chemical weapon programmes. He actually turned out to have abandoned his chemical weapon programmes entirely, under international pressure. And the only result was that we killed them. Ukraine very similar situation, was encouraged to give up its nuclear weapons and it actually had them, unlike the others. It physically had nuclear weapons, gave them up because it was 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 are going to try to develop nuclear programmes. It’s Saudi Arabia will try to develop a nuclear programme. It’s European states will try to develop nuclear programmes. I mean, who wouldn’t develop a nuclear programme if you are in a world in which Trump and Netanyahu can literally get out of bed in the morning, make no international legal arguments, not make any arguments to Congress, not bother to consult their allies, and destabilise an entire region, plunging the global economy into a horrible mess with no due process, no thought, no moral argument, no legal argument, no pragmatic argument. Why wouldn’t you break away from those alliances and try to set up your own weapon?
Just circle back to Islam for a second. I feel like there is an understanding that’s characterised by empathy that actually is an understanding of that world. And when I look across national British 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 parties on the radical right in Britain pledging to do things like banning the burqa, I think much of the way our politics engages with Muslims and Islam is a bigoted one. And whilst there are obvious downsides and consequences, not least for Muslims living in Britain, there is now increasingly in the explicit national interest, if the West’s activity in Iran was more characterised by intelligence and understanding and empathy, it seems to me that our national interest might be better served. And I would just kind of invite your reflections on the sort of animosity that exists in much of our politics towards people of this faith, people of this religion, that live here.
Yeah. I think we’ve got to be very clear that this is basically racism. I mean, essentially the AfD in Germany or the far right in Britain, or all those people on social media who are talking about Judeo-Christian values and saying, I’ve got nothing against people of colour I just don’t like Islam, are basically racist. Essentially what they’re trying to do is drive hundreds of thousands, millions of people out of their country. Some of the AfD leadership are very clear about it. They talk about remigration. You’re a Muslim, you’re going to be shoved out of Germany.
It’s the most amazing nonsense. This idea that somehow Islam itself is a kind of inherently bad religion and other religions are sort of inherently good, is completely demented. World history is littered with Christians doing horrible things, even Buddhism has a kind of radical fringe, Hindu nationalists doing bad things, religious Zionists in Israel doing horrible things. All of them, if you’re an extremist, appealing to some weird scriptural justification. But the point is that the extremism precedes the scriptural justification. It’s not driven by the scriptural justification, right?
I’ve spent a lot of my life living in Muslim countries. My lived experience is of extremely generous, dignified, thoughtful, empathetic societies which don’t begin to resemble the kind of ideas that white non-Muslims develop. It’s partly just pure ignorance. It’s not very different from the kind of way that our experience with other forms of racism. The kind of ways that people thought about black people when they hadn’t met any black people or the kind of ways that people thought about people who were gay until they actually had some gay friends. A lot of it is simply that they just don’t know any Muslims. They didn’t understand the lived experience of it. They don’t understand that. Now add to that the way of in which this is being weaponised around the world. It’s really disturbing, profoundly disturbing.
[See also: Donald Trump is my old friend – but he’s lost the plot]
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