Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke – OU PIPS Week-20260317_162029-Meeting Recording

March 17, 2026, 4:20PM

3h 13m 12s

Jack.Flaherty started transcription

michael clarke   0:05
OK, I’ve said I’ve can you hear me, Jack? OK, I assume other people can as well. I’ve I’ve sent you by e-mail the file with some PowerPoint slides in. If you receive it, you can bring them up then fine. If not, don’t worry.

Jack.Flaherty   0:08
Yes, I can.

michael clarke   0:22
So we should start to talk about the Ukraine war and maybe what it tells us about European politics. I think introductory points are that this goes back a very long way.
To the end of the Cold War, which finished in 1991 when the Soviet Union just disbanded. I mean, the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and then in the end of the year 1991, literally over Christmas, New Year, the Soviet Union just collapsed, just stopped.
And it was replaced by 15 different successor states. One of them was Russia, the Russian Federation, another was Ukraine. And then there was the Baltic state, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, there was Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and then the the countries that we call them the stands, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan.
Uzbekistan, so on. So the 15 different states replaced the old Soviet Union. And so they all date, every one of them dates from 1991. But Putin, who at that time was just a a minor official in Dresden, he was a KGB official. He ran the Dresden office, which wasn’t a big.
Office. It wasn’t even the Berlin office, but as a relatively junior KGB director of a city in East Germany, he was appalled by what he saw. And the views he had then are the views he has now. They haven’t changed at all since 1991.
What has changed is his power, his ability to direct a whole society in this very, very not just dictatorial way, but increasingly now totalitarian way. And there’s a difference between dictatorship and totalitarianism. He is a complete dictator.
And he’s moving toward he’s he’s into the box now marked totalitarian, where the the dictator tries to influence the way people genuinely think, not what they what they can and can’t do. That’s what dictators do. They control what people can and can’t do. Totalitarianism is another stage where the the leader of the state tries to.
Take what people even think, what they genuinely think, because you work on them over a generation, 20 odd years. And So what has changed is Putin’s power and his control over Russia, not his views. So his views were always that what happened in 1991 was a catastrophe.
That it was a historical injustice to the the Russians, and in those days the Russians meant the Soviet Union, and that he had a sort of historical duties, a historic duty to try to do something about it.
And that was clear by 2007. He came to the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and made very, very clear statements about how illegitimate this all was. And people at Munich that thought, Oh well, you know, he’s angry, he’s upset, so on, you know that the world has moved on.
And in 2008 came the invasion of Georgia, where he took advantage of some very foolish policy on the part of Mikhail Sakhifvili, the president of Georgia at the time. It was very mistaken stuff. And and the West, I mean the EU, the European Union in particular, was very foolish in 2008, nevertheless.
Putin took advantage of the situation and moved into Georgia and grabbed a couple of a couple of regions in Georgia and defeated them in a very quick war. And then from 2010 onwards, sorry, let me get rid of that from 2010 onwards.
He began to create an even bigger set of problems by intervening around different parts of the world. So he was involved in the Syrian civil war from 2015 onwards. He kept Bashar the side afloat.
He was involved in the Chechen war, wars in Chechnya, which is inside his own territory, incidentally. I mean that was a, you know, regional war to suppress nationalism in the Caucasus. And then famously, of course, in 2014, that was the first modern invasion of Ukraine when he took over Crimea.
In a in a very quick coup and then established militias in the the Donbas region, which is the eastern part of Ukraine in Luhansk and Donets, the two, the two provinces, Oblast they’re called and the the militias eventually took about 30%, about 1/3 of Luhansk and.
Donetsk, a little bit more Donetsk, and then they sat there after 2014. So there’d been two pushes, one that grabbed the hold of Crimea and then a couple of months later created instabilition trouble within the within areas of Donbass and grabbed a piece of the Donbass.
And that’s where it stayed until 2022, until the 24th of February 2022, which was the beginning of what we now call, you know, the full scale invasion. And until that point, the Western world, when it was thinking about Russia and Putin, thought, look, this man and this country is a bloody nuisance, but it’s it’s only a bloody.
Nuisance. It will not have a strategic effect on Europe unless we allow it to. So if we’re resolved, if we’re mature, if we just handle it in the way that we can handle it, the Russians will always be a bloody nuisance for the next few years. But that’s OK, we can live with that. And that was that was the view I took. That was the view most people took.
Because we always thought that although Putin is a playground bully, he is a very calculating playground bully. He’s not, he’s not, he’s not crazy. He actually knows where to stop bullying. He knows where to push, knows where to pull back. And he does have areas, some aspects of his policy, which at the time people thought, well, maybe you can deal with this.
You know, maybe he’s not as bad as he seems and so on. Well, 2022, and we can talk about why. But in 2022, he goes for broke. He, you know, he crosses the border, he lies to everybody about what he’s doing. I mean, literally there was a procession of politicians in and out of his of the Kremlin in December, November.
December 2021 and then January and early February 2022. And to every single person, he said, I have no intention of invading Ukraine. You’re all getting yourselves into a state about it. And then on the 24th of February, he invaded Ukraine. And the intention was to take the country in three days.
In other words, it was not, wasn’t really an invasion because he only had 190,000 troops to do it. It’s a big country. It’s the biggest single country in Europe in ground area apart from Russia itself, big country. And So what he intended to do with 190,000 troops was get into Kiev quickly, get into the palace, kill the.
Sk.
family and anybody else that was close to him and then just replace them with a puppet government and then suppress any dissent in the major cities by about the middle of March. That was the idea. Three days to grab the the government in Kiev, kill Zelensky, and then suppress any dissent within about four or
Five weeks after that, that was the plan. It went completely and utterly wrong for reasons that we, you know, can talk about. And from there on, it’s never been clear what his aims are. I mean, we know in reality and in a way I say it’s never been clear. He’s never said these are my war aims. When we achieve this, I’ll stop fighting. He’s never said that.
But we know that what he wants is to is to bring Ukraine back into the Russian Federation. In July 2021, he produced a long essay, or at least he put his name to a long essay that was written by some other people by and large. But this long rambling essay was.
It’s all about how Ukraine wasn’t really a proper state. It had no right to exist. It was always part of Russia. And there is a historic crime being committed against Russia in the fact that Ukraine was even considered as a separate state. And again, as I said, that’s always what he believed.
And so we know that ultimately he intends to conquer the whole of Ukraine. But he, you know, sometimes he says it’s all about de Nazifying the government, whoever they are. I mean, you know, the idea that Ukraine is run by Nazis is ridiculous. I mean, absolutely ridiculous, because if you want to be scientific about it, the last, the last election in Ukraine, of course, for 2019.
And the Neo Nazis with all of their allies, you know, the right wing, the right wing and the right wing and the ultra right wing and the Neo Nazis altogether got less than 2% of the vote, less than 2%, whereas the AFD in Germany, who are very Neo Nazi by by some standards, get 30% of the vote.
And we’re supposed to worry about what happens in Ukraine. So, you know, it was all about denazifying the government. No, it wasn’t. They were all drug dealers in in Kiev. No, they’re not. That was another one. It’s all about protecting the Russian speakers in the Donbas. No, it isn’t. There are Russian speakers all over Ukraine.
Zelensky, his first language is Russian. I mean, he was brought up in Russian. I mean, the Russian speakers, it’s not an issue. It just doesn’t exist. There’s a problem, as it were, given that most people in Ukraine, certainly in western, in eastern Ukraine, sorry, most people in eastern Ukraine are naturally Russian speakers. So there’s all sorts of rationales been going around.
And then the and then what’s happened to Putin is this, and this is where it really matters to European security. Having failed to grab the government, he has emerged in two or three different guises. So when the war didn’t go to plan by 2023.
Instead of being a special military operation to rectify a problem in Kiev, it then became the defense of the motherland. It became the defense of Russia because the Western world is trying to use Ukraine as the front line in an attempt to undermine Russia. So it turned into that.
So it’s another version of the Great Patriotic War, which is what Russian propaganda talks about all the time. And then in 2024, it morphed again into something else, which is that this is all about a change in the nature of world politics. So the old Western dominated world is finished. It’s corrupt, it’s collapsing.
And China and Russia together are leading a new liberation of the colonial peoples who suffered for two centuries under Western domination. So it’s become now that that Ukraine is the front line in a war in Europe, which is the front line of an international transformation process.
Which will be led from Beijing and Moscow. That’s for that reason, it is now a a genuine challenge to the to the nature of the whole global system, because that’s what the war has become.
And then one final introductory point I’d make is that, you know, why doesn’t this worry the rest of the world more than it does? Well, you’ve got to go back only to the 3rd of March 2022. So the invasion takes place on the 24th of February. On the 3rd of March 2022, there’s a big meeting in the General Assembly of the United Nations.
And that’s, you know, the world cause, as it were, the world’s Parliament. And a very, very strong motion was put to the General Assembly, you know, deploring the invasion and demanding, demanding that the Russians immediately withdraw from the from Ukraine. So it’s very strongly worded declaration. It was only the General Assembly, so it doesn’t carry any legal weight.
It’s an expression of opinion. And so that was on the 3rd of March, and 144 nations voted in favour of that motion out of out of what, 195 in the UN 144 of them voted for it. 5 voted against it, 5, which was Russia, of course, Belarus.
Syria, North Korea and Eritrea, for God knows what reason. Eritrea. Anyway, five of them voted against it, but 35 nations abstained. And the abstainers were very interesting because China abstained, India abstained, South Africa abstained, Nigeria abstained. All of these are important.
Important states. And so when you look at it, 144 nations voted for a very strong anti Russian motion, 40 nations, you know, 5 against and 35 abstention. They didn’t vote for it. And those who didn’t vote to condemn Russia contains more than half of the world’s population. That’s the point.
Stainers between them accounted for more than half of the world’s population. And that’s that’s where we are with it. The the the rest of the world doesn’t care who’s right or wrong, doesn’t care about the genocidal behaviour or the barbarity of it, or the lack of law or the naked aggression. They don’t really care about that. They’re looking after their own interests, which is what states do. And so it’s.
It’s not about who is right or wrong. It’s about who will prevail, who will win, who will be seen or or seen or perceived to win. And that’s the point that the West, whether it likes it or not, is now involved in a a struggle within Ukraine.
For who will be seen, be perceived by the rest of the world to prevail? Because if the Russians are perceived to prevail, then everyone will make their choices to say, well, this is the way it’s going to be, and we’ve got to get used to that. And we’ve got to adjust ourselves to Russian power in Europe and the new world domination or new world order, which Russia and China.
China talk about. Or if Russia is pushed back to the point where it is perceived to have lost, whether it has or not, it’s perceived to have lost by the rest of the world, then the view will be, well, the Western world actually is quite powerful. It’s all mixed up and it says strange things. But actually when the Western world gets its act together, it really is pretty powerful.
So that’s what’s been at stake. Lots of things have happened, of course, in 2022. But that’s how we sort of got from the end of the Cold War to here. And European security is now in a a more delicate and dangerous position that it’s been in any time in the last 80 or 90 years.
And we are now, I keep saying this, we’re going back to a Europe that is much more typical of the Europe of the last thousand years, that the Europe of the last thousand years has been, it’s been a continent of insecurity, of uneven prosperity and anxiety. That’s the nature of European politics over about 1000 years.
Had a very, very privileged period since about 1945, my generation and your generation and your children’s generation. We’ve been very, very privileged because our experience is absolutely not typical. And what is probably happening now is that Europe is becoming more typical.
Of the situations of the last thousand years. So what’s at stake in Ukraine, in my view, could hardly be more important. So that’s my opening gambit if you want to sort of raise questions or think about things or.
Begin legal proceedings, then please do so now, yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   15:21
That was great, Michael. Thank you so much. I I do have one question if I could take the first one. You you you kind of framed this as like Putin’s war and you know the the Putin led this and I I’m wondering about.

michael clarke   15:29
Yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   15:37
You know, there hasn’t been, you know, any major form of resistance. I mean, there’s been few protests here and there and you know, certainly a few people have, you know, fallen out of windows. But you know, most estimates are saying 100 / 100, over 1,000,000 casualties.

michael clarke   15:44
Yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   15:56
Of Russian soldiers and you really think these are numbers that are affecting civilians and affecting the the population of Russia and you don’t see that type of protest or it kind of obstructs them and you know thinking about the the Afghan war with lesser and any of that was I think.

michael clarke   15:58
Yeah.
No.
He.
Yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   16:16
200,000 Western soldiers were casualties and that, you know, some people claim red to the collapse of the USSR. And here you have a war that’s that’s dragging on even worse than Afghanistan for the Russians and and it just seems to be, yeah, they just accept it. So I’m just wondering about that.

michael clarke   16:23
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. I mean in in in Afghanistan the Russians lost, it was about just it was under 60,000, fifty something thousand over a period of about eight years of of dead. And the casualties now are dead, at least a quarter of a million, probably more like 350,000 dead and their total.
Casualties are estimated by the British Ministry of Defence now as 1.25 million. So the one and a quarter million casualties that dead and seriously wounded. By seriously wounded, I mean people who life changing injuries. You lose a limb or something like that. I mean an injury that keeps you to take you off the battlefield.
Forever really, rather than one that you can get patched up and go back on. So total casualties are like 1.25 million at the moment and and it’s not having a it’s having a disquieting effect in Russia because after four years it is coming home to roost in in all communities, but to begin with.
Russians made sure that the people who were fighting were from all the eastern provinces, all the Siberian provinces and and from the the Caucasus, the Caucasian provinces, the people in Moscow and Petersburg, they didn’t feel it much at all. But they’re beginning to now. And that’s what four years of war really does. I mean, you know, there is.
There’s a sense in which everybody gets affected. And now, interestingly, in this last two or three weeks, what’s been the the talk of of both Moscow and Petersburg is why the Internet is so bad. The Internet is shut down. People can’t take money out of cash machines. They can’t pay for things on their phones. It’s getting very, very annoyed. They’re getting very, very annoyed about it.
Because the state is so determined to press down on dissent that it’s closing down the Internet, even in Moscow and Petersburg. But the basic point you make, Jack, is also the one that Putin has. Remember, he’s been in power now for 26 years.
And he’s on his 5th war, 26 years, his five wars. This is his fifth and biggest by far. And like all dictators, he lives by war. He lives by warfare because that increases his domestic power. But it also means he’s had a whole generation, people, you know, young people have grown up without knowing any other leader than Putin. And so they’ve grown up with the.
The the narrative that Putin and the people around him have created. So, you know, this is a narrative of a particular Russian elite or the oligarchs and the kleptocrats. They basically they’ve taken control of the Russian economy in the early 1990s. They got the the assets and they’ve become very, very wealthy on them.
But it is also Putin’s war, because he has identified himself with this completely and utterly as his project, because he intends to go down in history as one of the great Russian leaders. And who does he admire? Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Stalin. And he wants to be in that group. He wants to be Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin and Putin.
That’s the way he wants history to think of him as a great Russian leader. And I’m not just guessing about that. I mean, I’ve, you know, I speak to people who’ve worked, who know Putin, have met him and know the inside story of Putin. And they say that’s the way he is. I mean, that’s that is how he is. He’s not a, he’s not a, he’s not a very clever man particularly, but he’s got a lot of cunning.
And he’s got a lot of determination and he’s now in a situation where he can’t back off. He’s gone too far now. So he has to see this through to some sort of resolution that leaves him looking like the greatest Soviet leader, the greatest Russian leader since Stalin. So in that respect, it is his war and if he died tomorrow or were assassinated or something like that.
He will be replaced by a hard liner. He’d be, he’d be, he won’t be a nice man. The only thing we’re certain about, absolutely certain about is that you’ll be replaced by a man. It will be a man who takes over after him for sure. But and that man might be a bit more pragmatic, but that it’ll be a hard liner. It’ll be, it’ll be the one after next.
After Putin, that we might be able to get back on terms with, because that’s usually the way it is in Russian history. Every time the Russian leader, and this goes back to Alexander the First, Alexander the Second, Nicholas the Second, when you lose a Russian leader like those people and then, you know, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and so on, Gorbachev, there’s always a period of chaos. Somebody emerged.
Judges doesn’t last very long. It’s the one after that that becomes the leader that maybe you can get on terms with.

Jack.Flaherty   20:46
Perfect. OK. Should we take one question from Thomas and then we’ll go to the chat. There’s a few questions there. So Thomas and for everyone else, please feel free if you want to put in chat or raise your hands or we’ll we’ll go back and forth.

michael clarke   20:48
Yeah.
Whatever. Yeah.
OK.

Jack.Flaherty   21:02
So Thomas.

Tomo Pierzchala   21:04
Hiya. Um, so I mean, it’s great insights. I’m a Polish person, so this conflict hits very close to home. Yeah. Um, so I’ve had this kind of double fold question because um.

michael clarke   21:10
So I see from your spelling of your name, yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   21:12
OK.

Tomo Pierzchala   21:19
From when when communism was being overthrown in Poland, um, from anecdotal and and some lesser reported sources, I know that there was Western influences and covert tactics of um, what in Scottish terms is.
Called the picking out dickies from the crowds, which meant, uh, finding the communists and and removing them from areas where they might have any sort of counter influence. And so in this same perspective, uh, what Putin is saying is that he’s actually running a counter insurgency.
To what is a a Western insurgency, which is, you know, we could call that a a even a populist or Western influence movement. Um. So in in that context, um, how how do you explain uh, these sort of?

michael clarke   22:02
Hmm.

Tomo Pierzchala   22:09
Complex military tactics without oversimplifying these these sort of historical and as well as the the contemporary military context and and oversimplifying the human cost that exists in all of that.

michael clarke   22:25
Yeah, I mean, you’re absolutely right, Thomas. The thing is, during the Cold War, or what I used to call my youth, but during the Cold War, both sides tried to subvert each other and neither side was particularly effective, to be honest. I mean, the Russians tried it in all sorts of ways across Europe. I mean, you might remember, we might have read about Eurocommunism.
In Italy they sort of were able to help communist parties get very close to power in Italy and they used to play all sorts of games which I used to remember and some of which I got I can get involved with, but I saw it first hand in Berlin in the 1970s. So I mean I’m by and large it was very crude stuff. It was very, very easy to spot and it only really affected.
People.
They were easily influenced. You know, they call them the, you know, the the fellow travellers or the useful idiots. And the West tried to affect Russian thinking slightly more, a bit more subtly, but no more successfully, really, with things like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty used to be in radio stations and and.
Messages at BBC World Service and there was an attempt to wasn’t it wasn’t as much to undermine institutions in Russia because that was usually usually went wrong, but to influence the OR give help to the civil society people give help to those who are more interested in democracy.
And and that’s, you know, the Russians take that in a very hostile way. And again, it wasn’t always particularly successful, although it did have more success than the Russians felt comfortable with after the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. And a lot of humanitarian stuff was done under the guise of humanitarian work, a lot of.
Pressure groups were helped with money and sort of support and so on, so that they could exert pressure on the government. But we, you know, it was kind of done in a in a sort of democratic-ish way on the assumption that ultimately Russia would turn into a democracy, which of course it didn’t.

Jack.Flaherty   24:12
Mhm.

michael clarke   24:20
Now that was all the old stuff. What we’re living now is hybrid warfare because of the influence of social media and because of the the sheer ubiquity of the communication of the Internet and so on. It is now possible not just to throw radio messages out or TV programmes out or whatever it might be, but.
As you know, to get right into individualized groups and individual people, to feed them stuff which is completely and utterly untrue, but very convincing to feed them AI generated content of, you know, of an American president, you know, with his clothes off or whatever it might be, you know, thinking of stories which undermine.
Political leaders say there it is in black and white in front of your eyes. Because of all of that, we’re now living in an age of hybrid warfare. And the Russians are have become much better at this than us because they sort of invented it. And what they talk about is that if you’re going to oppose somebody, then you oppose them in every possible way. So you you.
Pull every lever that you’ve got to pull from the military if you if you go that far through to subversion, through sabotage, through using 5th columnists. And again, I could keep you here for the rest of the day giving you real examples of the ways in which Europe is currently being attacked in cyber warfare, in social media, in.
Sabotage in trying to get 17 year old kids on board with small payments of money just to do things for a laugh. You know, set fire to this building. Why not? You know, have a laugh, get some money. All those sort of things are happening all the time and the West is trying to counter that. But also the West is thinking, well, how can we undermine the the.
Russian power structure. So we’re getting a bit more subtle at it and it’s all fairly dirty politics, no question about it. And that’s why it’s so important to us to establish, as it were, guidelines as to what we do and why we’re doing it, because it runs out of control very easily.
And I’m quite worried about it, to be honest, that in the era of hybrid warfare, it makes the Cold War look, look innocent by comparison, you know, comical by comparison. And I remember lots of comical things with agents and people I used to meet and people used to want to meet me, KGB officer. And I knew he was KGB. He knew I knew he was KGB and we’d have lunch twice a year.
And have these comical conversations and you know and it was so innocent by comparison we’ve got goes on now anyway. So you know this is these are uniquely challenging times where statecraft has become very as much of it goes on under the counter.
Over the counter.

Jack.Flaherty   26:59
Perfect. So we have one question from Kellum. What, in your view, Chris’s contemporary rus are over the lane from authoritarianism into totalitarianism?

michael clarke   27:11
Oh yeah, OK. So I mean the the sort of political behaviour metrics, metrics on this is that the governments can go from a secure democracies at one end of the spectrum, you know, secure, good democracy, working in their own way, whatever is suitable to their culture to.
Democracies or maybe emerging democracies from a country coming out of a dictatorship and then you move across the spectrum. It can then go to autocracy, which is, you know, the sort of thing you’ve got in Hungary at the moment. You’ve got a democratic leader just about in Orban, but he admits he is an autocrat, he said. I believe, you know, he said. I believe in illiberal democracy. I don’t believe.
In liberal democracy, I believe in illiberal democracy. That’s what he talked about. So that’s that’s where you get autocracy. And then if you keep on moving across the spectrum, autocracy very quickly becomes dictatorship and then dictatorship becomes totalitarianism. And we’ve never, I don’t think in this world we’ve never had true totalitarianism.
Yet we’ve had it in theory. George Orwell talked about it. 1984 is the the the novel 1984. It’s all about true totalitarianism and the Nazis tried tried to create totalitarianism. And but remember, Nazi Germany only lasted for 12 years from the, you know, from from the power.
Hitler coming to power to the collapse of 1945 was only 12 years. But in that 12 years, the Nazis tried totalitarianism to to make people think, not just behave the way they wanted them to behave, but to think the way they wanted them to think. And there’s elements of totalitarianism in Stalin’s Russia, certainly after the 2nd.
World War or, you know, the propaganda, the Jews. So that that’s, you know, totalitarianism is a it’s a kind of an assault by the dictator on the population as a whole. And remember, you know, going back to George Orwell, 1984, you know, Orwell did not foresee the idea of a television in everybody’s room watching them because he thought it was.
Impossible in the modern society. This shows how quaint things were. He wrote that book in 1948. That’s why it’s 1984. You reverse the reverse the date, but he wrote it or he published it in 1948. And in 1948, the idea of a government that could watch everybody all the time seemed impossible. So he didn’t. He didn’t talk about that. What he talked about, he said.
The elite, the middle classes, we watch them all the time. And as long as the middle classes are controlled by us watching them everywhere, then everybody else will take their lead from the middle classes. So the rest of the people, you just give them bread and circuses, just give them things to keep them happy and they’ll do what they’re told. That was the the George.
Well, conception that that totalitarianism doesn’t need to affect everybody, just needs to affect the middle classes, the intelligentsia, the dangerous people. And so you watch them, control them and then they basically influence everybody else. And yeah, one of the ironies of modern, the modern world.
Is that modern technology has given us more, much more than George Orwell could ever have imagined. And so in in some respects, the totalitarianism that is now possible, it’s never quite happened, but the totalitarianism that is now possible is more than George Orwell ever thought about.
It.

Jack.Flaherty   30:25
Right. So Sebastian writes, he thinks here and he mentioned that he see you, you mentioned that Putin sees it as China and Russia are pushing against the West. What is China’s official stance in this context? And then Kalam also kind of brings up.

michael clarke   30:26
Mhm.
Mm.

Jack.Flaherty   30:43
Wouldn’t if Russia collapses over the Ukraine issue or or internal strife, would that not open up an opportunity for China to get export Siberia and the western Far East? So are they hedging their bets too because they don’t want to take either side or or they kind of.

michael clarke   30:49
Hmm.

Jack.Flaherty   31:01
You know, they wouldn’t mind either outcome.

michael clarke   31:02
Yeah.
Yeah. OK. OK. Well, two things there. Thanks. Let me just do Russia in the West first or Putin in the West. One thing that I, you know, if I’d spoken a bit longer, I would have told you Putin’s view is very interesting about containment. You know, containment is a Western policy that was devised in 1946, 1947 at the end of the Second World War started.
Cold War. And when I was a first year student, my first essays were on or about containment. We, you know, we were given this content. So find out about containment, come and write essays about containment. So I felt a sort of great affinity with it as an idea. What Putin says, and he’s on record of saying this in several speeches, he said, you know, the West thinks it started.
Containment in 1947. No, it didn’t, he said. The West has been, has had a policy of containment since the 18th century because the West has feared Russia all that time. They fear us because of our power and our cultural dominance and our natural contribution to world civilization. They’ve always trying to push us back, always.
They claim they’ve only been doing it or containing us during the communist period 1947. But no, it’s not in Jews communism and capitalism. This is Russia. They hate Russia. And that’s his sort of sense, his phobia. And that links with something else that Medvedev said. Dmitry Medvedev, you know, who used to be the president and the Prime Minister, he sort of dual hatted.
Did it with with Putin. You know when when Putin had to step down, Medvedev became president. Putin was Prime Minister. Then when that finished, Putin went back to being president and Medvedev was Prime Minister. Now Medvedev is out of the circle, the inner circle, really.
And he’s a he’s a drunk. He’s an alcoholic. Um, but he’s in his more sober moments. He said to me rather very interesting a couple of months ago, he said, you know, NATO believes in peace through strength. That’s NATO’s motto, peace through strength. He said we don’t believe in that. We believe in peace through fear.
Peace through fear, because our history tells us that only if our neighbors fear us can we feel secure. We only want, you know, security for us is having weak neighbors, not strong neighbors, because of our history. And that I think tells you a lot about the mindset of this group who have been in charge.
In Russia now for 20 odd years. So you know, Russia in the West is not a it’s not a happy story. I mean and the other thing that Putin always says is peaceful coexistence. Whenever we have peaceful coexistence, we lose, we lose. And that’s true. They do is whenever Russia going back to the mid 19th century with the Tsar, with Alexander the 1st.
Whenever Russia has peacefully coexisted with Western Europe, it loses by comparison because it’s nothing to do with what the West does. It’s what the West is, what we are that they find a problem, not what we do. It’s what we are. They, you know, this, the idea of capitalist liberal democracies are a threat to.
Governmental structures that have arisen in Russia, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way of reconciling that, at least for the foreseeable future. And then on the the question of China, at the moment, Russia is a vassal state to China. I mean, Putin, although he pretends that he is, you know, he’s the same status of Xi Jinping, he’s not. In reality, he’s on his knees.
In front of Xi Jinping, the Chinese are so dominant now and that’s a total reversal of the Russia, China relationship right through till the the end of the 20th century. I mean 1945 onwards, the Chinese were very much the junior partner to the great Soviet Union and that relationship is now completely reversed. So the I mean the the Russians need China.
Keep.
Their oil and the Chinese do buy it at very discounted rate rates. There’s a new pipeline called the Power of Siberia too, this great pipeline between Russia and China. And Putin really needs this pipeline. And Xi Jinping won’t ever quite agree to it. They keep saying, oh, more technical things. He’s really got him over a barrel, a barrel of oil.
And Xi Jinping keeps manipulating Putin over the need for this pipeline, which the Russians are desperate to get built. And China keeps Putin in the war in Ukraine. I mean, the Russian military would have run out of components for its weapons without China supplying them. So, I mean, Russia is.
Totally different, not totally, but largely dependent on North Korea for artillery shells. And it’s largely more than largely dependent on China for components for its own armaments production because it can’t get them from the West except illegally. And so the relationship between China and Russia is a bit like it’s a it’s a variation on the.
relationship between China and North Korea. I mean, North Korea is a is a hermit Kingdom, and the Chinese have to keep it going, even though it’s a real nuisance to them. But nobody else will support it, and the Chinese feel they must. Russia is like a bigger version of that, that they they need to keep Russia going, but Russia is getting weaker and weaker in relation to China.
And having said that, China finds this war in Ukraine very helpful because it keeps Russia weak, keeps Russia using up all the stuff that they have to use up, keeps it expensive. It distracts the West. It, as we’ve seen, it splits the Western alliance, which is the major strategic objective of China. It splits.
NATO. I mean, NATO is in terrible shape now because of all of this. And so the Chinese are getting a lot out of just keeping this wall going. They don’t want Russia to collapse completely. But equally, I don’t think they want Russia to win decisively either, because that will create its own dynamic in Europe, which will be bad for their economy, bad for the Chinese economy. So it.
The Chinese to keep this war more or less at the level that it is, and they pretend that they’re peacemakers. They pretend that they’re neutral, but of course they’re not. They’ve they’ve reached a level of of help which keeps everybody, as it were, at their beck and call. The only people who could really end this war are the Chinese because they could lean on Putin and say that’s it.
Finish. No more. And he would have to take that seriously. If they lent on him, he would have to stop. But they won’t. And so far they don’t feel any big reason why they they will have to. That might change in a year or two years. We don’t know.

Jack.Flaherty   37:02
Perfect I.

michael clarke   37:03
Should we take one more and have a break? You all need a break, I’m sure. Go on.

Jack.Flaherty   37:05
Yes, that sounds good. Let’s see, does one question from Kellum. Does Europe’s continued use of lesson gas not confirm the realist view of international reasons that national interest in energy security trump moral posturing?

michael clarke   37:23
Well, no, it’s not. It’s not straightforward use of gas. I mean, the Europeans were very determined when the war began to phase out Russian oil and Russian gas. And that takes a bit of time because different states have different levels of of need and and Hungary and Slovakia in particular have now got very pro Putin governments or banning Hungary.
Fiso in Slovakia and they basically do what the Kremlin tells them, although they’d never admit. Of course they would, you know, if I said that to their face, they’d say that’s ridiculous, but it isn’t. It’s what they do. And so they they, I mean the Hungarians have actually taken more oil from Russia since the war started because it’s been offered so cheaply because the Russians have got to get rid of it.
But if you look at European policy, I mean we we in Britain take no Russian oil and no Russian gas because we’re lucky we don’t need it. We get oversourced in the rest of the European Union. Russian oil has more or less been phased out now and will be no more new contracts from from last month, from January 2026.
And a complete phase out by 2027. So no oil by 2027. Except that President Trump has now, after complaining about it, has said, Oh well, I don’t mind the Hungarians and the Slovaks getting oil because he wants their governments to survive because they are, you know, anti European Union and all the rest of it on gas.

Jack.Flaherty   38:39
Yeah.

michael clarke   38:42
The story is this is a bit similar, but it’s taking a bit longer to phase it out only because some states, Germany still takes a little bit of gas. The Scandinavians don’t at all. Again, some of the southern states take a bit of gas and some of them get LNG, the liquefied natural gas, which the Russians send in tankers.
So there is some gas still in the system, but that’s been pushed out as well. I mean I can, I can guarantee that on present trends, on present trends by 20/28/29, Europe will take no Russian oil or gas. I mean that’s the direction of travel. And the point is this is where the the the war is got to hurt Russia because.
Europe was its main market for oil and gas because it’s close, it was nearest, it was easy. But that’s that will change. And the Russians are looking now for other markets. Maybe they’ll find them, but they’ll never find a market as convenient and as cheap for them to supply as the market in Europe. So, you know, realist politics are true.
I mean, you know, realist policy. I’m a great realist in politics, but all these realist perspectives are always complicated. You know, they’re full of inconvenient facts. So, you know, yes, we are still taking some oil and gas. No, we won’t be taking oil and gas in two years time.

Jack.Flaherty   39:58
Fantastic. So we’ll take a break now for 10 minutes and come back at at 5:10. So thank you.

michael clarke   40:01
OK.
OK, Jack, will we keep this link open? Jack, just leave this link open and come back in 10 minutes.

Jack.Flaherty   40:07
Yes, yeah, keep. Yeah, we’ll yeah, we’ll keep it open. And unfortunately, I didn’t get your e-mail with the maps, so OK, perfect.

michael clarke   40:10
OK.
I’ll try it again. OK. I’ll try it again. All right.

Jack.Flaherty   40:17
Perfect. See everybody in 10 minutes.

Tomo Pierzchala   40:22
Anybody wishes to jump in in the next 10 minutes just to kind of share your thoughts, see what what you think of everything so far. We’ll cut it. We’ll cut it off as soon as Professor Clark and.
Uh, it’s back, but if you wanna add anything to the discussion.
How we feeling so far as well? I know it can be quite jarring and there’s a lot of information coming in.
Yeah, definitely, Claire. I’ve I’m really excited about this and there’s there’s a lot of, I suppose, things that you don’t really hear in the mainstream that we can take away and kind of towards that. And I’m hoping to ask about or especially for us as people who are.
Interested in studying at Open University there is there is definitely opportunities for us to have some sort of.
Direction to take this information, maybe get a bit of inspiration for future modules that we want to do. Yeah, and and getting getting up-to-date information as well, I think in in historical context and embedding it in historical context can give a lot of value to.
To that.
DD211 What? So what’s DD211?
Is that like, uh, international relations column?

Calum Steen   42:47
DD211’s politics and institutions in the modern world, something like that, anyway. So we’re we’re just in the middle of the international relations module.

Tomo Pierzchala   43:02
Perfect. So it’s it’s hitting right, right the spot you want to hit with it, right?

Calum Steen   43:05
OK.
I know it’s, um, you don’t need to read the modules, you just look at the news, you know?

Tomo Pierzchala   43:16
You’re living the dream.
So how are you finding the the talk so far? Do you feel like there’s any information that you find a bit more novel or or maybe adds a little bit extra context to what you find in mainstream?

Calum Steen   43:34
Yeah, absolutely. I watch Professor Clark’s pieces on Sky News whenever I can, because I think he gives a much more informed perspective than the folks who just.
You know, reportedly the day’s events.

Tomo Pierzchala   43:55
Yeah, yeah, I I think Professor Clark has a cult following from what I’ve seen. People absolutely love him coming in. So on on his days off, he he blessed us with his presence. So yeah.

Beverley.Smit   44:13
Thomas, is it? Sorry. So no, no, I was just thinking, do you know Professor Clark’s work is on YouTube or something? I don’t have Sky, so I can’t. I can’t see anything.

Tomo Pierzchala   44:13
Yes, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. Sorry, I go.
Yeah, I’ll I’ll link some resources in the side chat. Um.

Beverley.Smit   44:29
OK. Thank you.

Tomo Pierzchala   44:31
Because he’s he’s been covering. I think he takes maybe 2 two days off every week. Um.
Obviously the days that he’s in it, it’s literally a day by day briefing of uh Iran. So the most recent one was just 21 hours ago, day 17.

Beverley.Smit   44:48
Hold on.

Tomo Pierzchala   44:51
Uh, so that’s the link in the side chat there.

Beverley.Smit   44:52
Oh, thanks.

Tomo Pierzchala   44:54
So it’s very quick four minute and and I love, I love the upgrade of his touch screen because he’s got his little icons he can place and and yeah, so aside from giving us good spoken context, he’s also putting all of that on the map, which for me as a visual learner I think.

Beverley.Smit   44:59
Yeah.

Tomo Pierzchala   45:13
It’s it’s one of the best things to to to kind of solidify the knowledge.

Beverley.Smit   45:15
All good.
So watch that.

Tomo Pierzchala   45:28
There’s a couple more as well. There’s day 16.

Beverley.Smit   45:36
The links will be there, won’t they? If you click on one, you can put them in, yeah.
Maybe I have to subscribe to Sky.

Tomo Pierzchala   45:45
Yeah, yeah.
Definitely.

Beverley.Smit   46:07
Oh, thank you, Callum. I didn’t know that.

Tomo Pierzchala   46:22
By the way, if anybody found this event through our WhatsApp or our webpage, we also have an Eventbrite. I do recommend you give us a follow so that you get an e-mail anytime we’ve get new events coming up in the future.
Um, which I’m sure there will be many more of, including quizzes, so don’t don’t miss the next quiz.
And if you have ideas for events, if you know somebody that wants to speak in a similar capacity, if you’re quite friendly with your lecturer at the Open University, hop in the WhatsApp or or send me a DM.
And we’d happily have them on. Events like this can happen all the time, especially because we’re remote and kind of bridging theory and and and practice is important. So reach out and we’ve got the whole committee. We can arrange things and and get them done and yeah.
Also, in the future, become a member of PIPS if you haven’t already.

Beverley.Smit   49:17
It’s because you’ve got an open issue. e-mail Michael Power.
Oh.

Jack.Flaherty   49:38
Yes, I was able to get it from work.

michael clarke   49:39
That’s good, yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   49:42
So it’s, yeah, 10 past two. So we get started again. So thank you everybody for coming out for the southern half where Michael will kind of focus on the Mideast and the current situation there. So if you want to go ahead.

michael clarke   49:57
OK, Jack, just to advance that, you’ve got the slide set. Could you advance it? OK, yeah, just stick with that for a minute while we talk about it. That’s good. Yeah. So I’ll ask you to advance it later on as well. So just again some.
Outline ideas, first of all. So when we think about the Middle East, you’ve only got to look at the map. And I like this map because it’s not very detailed and I think it’s quite good for a a quick look and then we’ll look at a more detailed one in a minute, but.
There are four, there is a big four in the Middle East, and you can see it on the map there. The big four powers that really matter are Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran. That’s them. And it’s very obvious because of their size, because of their relative wealth, and in some cases Saudi Arabia, it’s absolute wealth.
And their populations, again, small population in Saudi Arabia, but a rather powerful economic unit. And so those are the big four. And those four will sort of create the political weather for most of the others. Now you could say the 5th power is the United States.
The US has had a relationship with the Middle East, which has been very active since the Second World War since 1941. And so sometimes you say, yeah, you’ve got the big four and then there’s whatever the US is doing, which varies from era to era. But that’s the first point. Second point is that most of our retention.
There’s been over the years been on the Levant. So the Levant is they are Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt. I mean it’s the it’s the Mediterranean coast and generally speaking, you know when when when I was a student again you you did Middle East politics, you spent most of your time looking at the Levant because you’re looking at.

   51:46
Yeah.

michael clarke   51:48
The the birth of Israel in 1948 and the the various war, the Arab Israeli wars and the Lebanon problem. And we looked at what was happening in Egypt and Jordan. Syria was a very is, was and is a very important country. It’s quite big, 25,000,000 population and so on.
And then there was less to say in those days about Iraq or Iran, which were oil producers, but oil was so easily available. And that oil has only been important to the Western world since the Second World War. During during the Second World War, it became important. It was an important resource, and it was a resource that had to be.
Defended. If the Germans had actually got pushed into Russia more effectively than they did in 1941, they would have then gone S through the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan to seize the oil fields of Iran.
And throw the British out of the Middle East. They wanted to throw the British out of Egypt, just as Napoleon did, in order to create an access which could keep, in this case, Britain, and then Britain and America out of the whole region. So.
The Levant was the the essence of most of the politics. But what has happened, of course, since the 19 late 1970s is the Gulf. So the Gulf countries, which is, you know, Iran, Iraq, maybe you call a Gulf country, but you Kuwait and then coming down the Gulf there, Bahrain, tiny little Bahrain.
Attached more or less to Saudi Arabia, just that there’s just a like a causeway in between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, then Qatar, tiny little Qatar, which is extraordinarily rich. And then the UAE, the United Arab Emirates group of seven Emirates, all put together by Britain in 1971, very successfully actually.
It’s one of the one of the few amalgamations in the post-colonial era that turned out to be very successful. Most of them didn’t. And then Oman and then Yemen is different because that’s the tip of the peninsula. And then of course Saudi Arabia. So when we talk about the Gulf, what we normally mean is Saudi Arabia and those tiny Gulf states from Kuwait in the north to Oman.
Or Muscat and Oman, as it’s usually probably called in the South. And what has happened since the 1970 is that power, real power, has moved from the Levant to the Gulf itself. And for obvious economic reasons, you know, that’s where it now lies.
Third point, which is worth concentrating on I think, is the the growth of Islamism. I mean this whole region before 2010 was tied up by very authoritarian governments of one sort or another. In the in the Gulf it was the monarchies. They were all led and still are.
Led by monarchies, they’re all royal families. And in the Levant, they were led by, I can say, right wing governments, but authoritarian governments apart from Israel, which is, as it says, it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. But as democracies go, it’s a very troubled democracy and there’s been sliding.
In a very authoritarian direction, but you know, Israel is Israel. But all of the other governments in the Levant were very autocratic. And then on the I always remember this date on the 17th of December 2010.
A young Tunisian man called Bouazizi was so angry in Tunisia, not even in Tunis, but in southern Tunisia. He was so angry at the way the the autocratic government treated him. He was a market seller. He just sold his fruit. He had nothing but his set of scales. That’s all he owned was the scales. That was capital. That’s all he owned.
And every morning he would buy fruit from the wholesalers and sell it on the streets and take the profit. And that’s what he kept, kept him alive. And they confiscated his scales. That’s all he had in the world to run his business. And he got so angry that he set fire to himself and killed himself. And that went viral on social media.
And that was the 17th of December. And it created outrage across the the youth of the Middle East. And by the end of January, Mubarak of Egypt had gone, had gone. And this whole series of revolutions took place across the Middle East, except in the monarchies.
The monarchies, with the exception of Bahrain, it was an uprising of Bahrain and the Saudis crossed the Causeway and basically put it down. The rest of the monarchies were sort of stable, but the Levant blew up in outrage and it was, you know, called at the time the Arab awakening and so on. It was a it was an awakening of young people who were so fed up with.
The corruption of the governments around them, and it created two things which you can absolutely understand now. And this is the way popular revolutions tend to go. They go to the extremes. You know, the moderates always get pushed aside pretty quickly by the extremists, whoever they are, whatever the left wing, right wing. In this case it was Islamist extremists and anti.
And so the Islamists took over in Egypt and then were pushed out by the anti Islamists, which is where we are now in Egypt with President Sisi, who is worse in autocratic terms than than Mubarak, who was removed. We had even worse repression in Syria. The Syrian civil war began in 2012 and was absolutely desperate.
As we know until last year, until the end of 2024, January 2025, when Syria is now run by a government who are originally Islamists and we’ll see if they we’ll see how Islamist they turn out to be. And so the whole of the Levant is now, as it were, fired by.
This competition and I’m speaking in very general term now of course between Islamists and anti Islamists and that goes on throughout the Levant. And then meanwhile the other great schism, if you like, is between Shia and Sunni. So between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two of the big four powers, the two big two of the big four that affect the others more than.
And Turkey and Egypt tend to do these days. And Iran, of course, is the is the home of Shia Islam, which is the the the less dominant, more disputed branch of Islam. And Saudi Arabia, of course, which is the home of the majority Sunnis.
You know, the whole of the the the Muslim world consists of about 1.4 billion people. Under the 7 1/2 billion people in the world, about 1.4 billion are Muslims. Only 10% of the Muslim world is Shia, but those 10% mainly live in the Middle East.
And so, you know, Iraq is predominantly Shia, but with a Sunni elite. Syria is predominantly Sunni, but with many Shia minorities. There’s a Shia Sunni split in Lebanon. There’s a there’s a small Shia Shia group in Jordan with a Sunni majority.
A major Sunni population, Saudi Arabia, but again with Shia elements and then Shia Muslims, although a different, a different branch of Shia in Yemen and so the Shia Sunni split.
Is another fault line in across the region. Doesn’t doesn’t cause wars as such, but it puts Saudi Arabia and Iran as against each other on a different on a new level as well as their great power status as well as the fact that Iran is is the great Persian Empire and Saudi Arabia was nothing until.
The 1920s and really until the 1960s, you know, there’s big, big differences in their culture and their history. But the sheer Sunni divergence adds a sort of, it adds a layer of confliction to everything else that happens.
And then we come to the war itself. Let’s talk about the war now. And by the war, I mean the 7th of October 2023. Jack, could we check, could we get the next map on? Could you just put the next one up?

Jack.Flaherty   59:46
Yeah.

michael clarke   59:49
OK, thank you. This is, this is obviously a more political map, more accurate in its way. But the the and again the the sizes of what what we’re talking about is quite interesting. You see Israel, see how small Israel is. You see that little what looks like a lake in the middle of Israel. It’s not the lake of course, that’s the West Bank.
And the that’s the that’s the occupied territories. And Gaza, I’m sure you will know is a tiny strip right at the base of the Egypt Sinai border, the border there with Egypt in green. And if you if you take a strip, you see how big that map is, how big the scale is the the.
Gaza is 5 miles wide and 30 miles long. So if you actually draw it on that map, you barely, you barely get your pencil on on Gaza before you’d have gone over it. That’s Gaza. And of course, on the 7th of October, Hamas in Gaza launched a an atrocity, an absolute atrocity.
Against Israel. And we all know about, you know, what happened there. We don’t. I mean, I’ll talk about it if you want to, but I guess we’re all fairly familiar with that. And the Israelis took an enormous hit with that. The hurt of it and the, you know, the pain and the outrage was astonishing and the rest of the world was astonished as well. What happened is that the the Israelis, as it were, fell back.
Back on themselves and they absorb that hurt and the pain. And Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, stayed in power. Everyone thought, including me, we thought he won’t last very long after this. This is such a humiliation, it’s such a failure of security and so on.
But he stayed in power by doubling down and doubling down and doubling down. And what the Israelis have effectively done since October 2023. So here we are, you know, 2 1/2 years later now is they came back, they took on their adversaries, first of all, one at a time and then altogether. So they took on Hamas immediately and they haven’t beaten them. Absolutely, they haven’t beaten.
In them. But they’ve wrecked Gaza and don’t really care about that. It’s such a small place, might have 2 million people in it. But you know, in Israel, most Israelis don’t even know what’s happening in Gaza. They’re really not interested. They just don’t care. You know, they don’t care because they don’t. They’re not interested in Gaza after what was done to them on the 7th of October. You know, they shrugged their shoulders.
So they took on Hamas and have reduced Hamas. Hezbollah in Lebanon, in southern Lebanon, targeted Israel with rockets. So they took Hezbollah on and in a brilliant two years ago now, a brilliant coup, they created the Pager scam where they persuaded the over many years the.
Persuaded Hezbollah to use these pages, which in fact were all doctored by the Israeli the the Security Service. And on a given moment they exploded and they completely decapitated in the sense that they killed or wounded a swath of Hezbollah leaders and the Israelis have gone after Hezbollah and they’re doing so now.
And they’ve decided now in this latest war that Trump initiated a couple of weeks ago, they’re going to finish it with Hezbollah now and forever. So that was their second group. They then took on the the militias, the Iranian militias who operate in Iraq and in Syria.
And they’ve targeted them relentlessly, are still doing so. They’re still hitting the militias in Syria and Iraq. So that’s a third set of of enemies. Fourthly, look at Yemen. Right down in the South there are the Houthis who controlled northern Yemen, fired various missiles N right up the Red Sea.
Miles to more than 1000 miles, actually more like 1300 miles to hit southern southern Israel. And so in hitting southern Israel, they got the Israelis back on their case and the Israelis have hit the Houthis very hard.
Uh, as indeed have other powers as well. And then finally, and ultimately, what Israelis have done is make war on Iran, which they’ve wanted to do for years. And Netanyahu, I mean, he has been trying to interest the Americans in hitting Iran since 1992.
He’s been talking about it again and again and again, because from his point of view, the great threat to Israel’s ultimate security is Iran, and particularly the Iranian revolution. The 1979 Iranian revolution, which established the Islamic Republic in Iran, is a constant threat to Israel because it is constantly.
Um, repeating the mantra that Israel must be destroyed, the Zionists, the Jews must be destroyed. And for Netanyahu, that means that they have no choice but to make war sooner or later on Iran. And he’s been waiting for this opportunity for a long time and so the 7th of October.
Began a series of events which were tragic and a tragic, wicked atrocity that then created a situation which Israel began to pull back, or get back, as it were, by by hitting first Hamas, then Hezbollah, then the militias in Iraq and Syria, then the Houthis, and then last year in June last year, the.
And the Americans came in at the 12 day war of June last year. The Israelis started it bombing the various sites in Iran. And the Americans came in on the last day and a half and bombed the nuclear sites. And no, I’m confident in saying no other president in history would have done that. No other American president would have done that.
But Donald Trump did. And in that respect, uh, Netanyahu has got in the White House the most ideal president he could ever have, because Trump agrees with Netanyahu. He agrees with what Israel wants to do. And the Israelis now have got the prospect of what they’ve always wanted, a greater Israel.
You know, they’ll use this war to reoccupy, I think probably reoccupy Gaza to take part of southern Lebanon, certainly to take the rest of the West Bank. They’ll push all the Palestinians out of the West Bank. They’re doing that now. And to to live for them in a more secure way with an in Iran, which is on its knees at the end of this war, whatever government is in.
Power in Iran. And so they look at this. Netanyahu looks at this as the great historic opportunity, just as we were saying, you know, Putin sees himself as the great Russian leader for the 21st century. So Netanyahu wants to go down as the greatest leader in a way since the since the beginning.
Since the 19 forty-eight, the the the Israeli leader who finally, finally made Israel secure within its own borders and in relation to the great problem of Iran. And there’s lots of reasons why that may not happen, but you can see why he probably thinks that.
And then we come to the war now, which began on the 28th of February. And Donald Trump was working himself up to this on the assumption that somehow he’d had to take the Iranians on. But here we are on, what are we on now? Day 18 of the war, I think, and we still don’t know what the Americans are trying to achieve.
They know militarily what they’re trying to achieve, and that’s expressed by Dan Kane, who’s the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is, you know, the top military person in the United States. And Dan Kane is very coherent about it. And he says our mission is to deprive Iran of any ability to project its power outside the country.
So basically deprive it of all of its military forces and its defence industries and anything which could be used outside Iran to keep Iran, as it were, fixated only on policing itself internally. So no threat to the north or the West, to Israel or to the Gulf. That’s what the military are trying to achieve because they they needed.
Target they need, you know, the military say, look, tell us what you want us to do and we’ll find ways of doing it. So militarily, yeah, that’s that is achievable. They haven’t achieved it yet and they may not, but it is achievable. But we don’t know. We really don’t know what President Trump wants to achieve. He said everything. I mean he said two or three times it’s regime change. We want to get rid of the.
Regime then sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Other times he said it’s about the nuclear sites. We want to deprive them of their nuclear forces there. And he said after last year when they attacked in the June war, the 12 day war last year, he said we’ve obliterated the nuclear sites, obliterate. That’s the word he used.
And every time somebody said you can’t have done that, he abused them and said it’s fake news, you’re liars and so on. Now he says, well, the nuclear sites are there. We’ve got to obliterate them again. So, you know, obliteration is something that you can have several times over in Trump world. So that’s he’s got to do the nuclear sites. And then he says we’ve got to actually get rid of their ballistic missile.
Viability, which is what really worries the Israelis, because it’s the ballistic missiles that are the most threatening to the Israelis. So he says that. And then he says we’ve got to create an Iran which is no threat to the waterways of the world. Well, OK, good luck with that one. Um, so these these.
Aims that Donald Trump keeps coming up with, you know, go round and round in circles. And then he says, I want to give the opposition in Iran, the people of Iran, who about 80% of the population, 92 million in Iran, about 80% of them are believed to be vehemently anti regime, anti government. They would love to get rid of the the Iranian revolution.
Love to get rid of the mothers. And he’s saying we want to give them the opportunity to come out on the streets. Well, at the moment, if they come out on the streets, they get shot. I mean, no question about it. The IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard and the badges, who are the militia, the, the, the.
They’re all amateurs, they’re all volunteers, but they’re murderous amateurs, and they’ll just shoot people if they think that they’re in any way opposed to the regime. So at the moment, the war is making the Iranian government stronger internally than than not. Now that may change because wars are very unpredictable, but that’s where we are.
At the moment with it. So we’ve got a campaign that’s going on. The Iranians at the moment are doing strategically quite well because although they’re being smashed from the air every day, I mean, well, they’re losing everything. They’re losing their their military, their Navy, their missiles, they’re going to lose all their nuclear sites and whatever is left, they’re going to.
They’re losing everything, but they’re still holding on because for them, you know, this may be a war of choice for America, but it’s a war of necessity for the regime because this is the an attempt to destroy them as a regime. And so they’ll do anything. They’ll they’ll, you know, go for any tactic, whoever gets hurt, whoever else it it it affects.
They’ll do it. And at the moment, what they want to do is last longer than America, to still be there in a month’s time, long after Donald Trump has got frightened of the consequences, the economic consequences of the war on world, on the world economy, on on inflation, on the price of gas, oil in the United States. They believe that he will declare victory.
To go home quite soon and they’ll still be there. And for them that will be a victory, and it will be a victory sanctified by God. Because remember, they think they’re there because God wants them there. And if Iran is on its knees at the end of it, well, that’s God’s will as far as they’re concerned.
So that’s where we are with the war on day 18. And then Jack, can you go on to the the final slide of this, of this one?
Thank you. I love this one. I mean, this is a satellite image. And so they’re fairly obviously see, see that little arrow at the bottom there. That’s the Strait of Hummers, much in the news now. And at the narrowest point, the the tip of the arrow to the coast up there, that’s that’s the size of the English Channel.
33 kilometres, 21 miles. That’s exactly the same as the English Channel. So think of that as Britain and France. There is the Strait of Hormuz. But you see from that map several things. One is that the Strait of Hormuz goes, you know, to the West of the sorry or the Gulf goes to the West of the Strait of Hormuz and around that bend there.
Right up to and you see where the the colouring gets sandy. Well, that’s the coast. That is the Chateau Arab waterway. So the the Gulf itself, where it stops being blue and goes to sandy, that’s Iraq and and part of Iran. So that’s the Chateau Arab waterway.
And that distance from the Shat Al Arab, the the bit where it goes sandy to the Strait of Hormuz is 600 miles, 600 miles. And there you can see that the the the big pimple sticking out into the Gulf West of the West of the the Hormuz that’s.
Qatar and then the tiny little pimple to the left of that. That’s Bahrain. That’s how tiny Saudi Arabia is the part of the bottom of the map. And then the UAE United Arab Emirates is the bit to the just to the to the West and South of the Australia of Hormuz and Oman. You can see the way.
Oman, you know, the sort of mount that range of mountains that sort of borders the north of Muscat and Oman. There’s Oman. And then if you look on the other side, you see the what looks like an enormous lake towards the top of the map, towards the the horizon. Well, that’s the Caspian Sea.
And then up there between and and to the left of that, you see the other lake just to the top left of the map. Well, that’s the Black Sea. So that’s, you know, Ukraine and the Ukraine and Russia and Georgia and there W of the Caspian Sea, Armenia and Azerbaijan and the Transcaucasus.
The the Caucasian or the Caucasus republics of Russia and then over to the right of the map was the the the other form of mountains that you see to the to the other shore of the Caspian Sea, the flat area and then the mountains after that.
Well, that’s the that’s the stands, there’s Kazakhstan and the other stands of Central Asia. And so you get a sense there of the the size of all of this, but the and the idea that this is a, this is an enormously variable region with variable weather and variable.
Topography. And yet the future of the world economy, and possibly the future of the Trump administration at the moment, hangs on that little bit of the arrow tip, the Strait of Hormuz, and that little little area there, the 3133 kilometres, the 21 miles because the ship.
Ships that go through there, they don’t have 30 kilometres of sea room because of the shallowness. You can see how shallow some of the water is as they go through there. They only actually have 11 kilometres to play with. There’s like an up lane and a down lane ships going into the into the Gulf. They have to go on the up lane and ships going out go on the down lane and so.
The up lane is is 3 kilometres wide and the down lane is 3 kilometres wide and there’s a separation zone in between, like a motorway barrier in the middle of five kilometres. So the usable sea room around that little tip is actually 11 kilometres and if we’re talking about ships here, the ultra large crude carriers.
They will take three hundred 350-400,000 tonnes. Remember an aircraft carrier is about 80,000 tonnes. So one of these crude carriers is what, four times five times bigger than an aircraft carrier and going round that tip they have to do a they have to do a going in, they have to do a really sharp left hand.
Turn because of the depth of the water and taking a 400,000 ton carrier going 12 knots around a sharp turn is quite challenging and the ships as they go through the Gulf there, they have to keep between 8 and 12 ship lengths apart, 8 to 12 ship lengths.
And so that means that these ships, though that sounds a lot, I mean any ship of two or 300,000 tonnes going at 12 knots takes a bit of stopping. And if they if one of them sort of slews around or is attacked or goes on fire, it’s quite difficult for the others to avoid it safely.
And so the dangers of the Strait of Hormuz is that the Iranians now have the opportunity to make the Strait of Hormuz dangerous. They can’t close it very easily, but they can make it dangerous for the indefinite future. And they have sort sort of. They knew that before, but they never demonstrated it. But in the last two weeks they have demonstrated in a way.
That the United States seems to be astonished by. Shouldn’t be, but it is. It’s been astonished by how easily they can render the Australia for most dangerous. And if they make it dangerous effectively, they’ve closed it to world shipping. And when this is all over, when the Americans have declared victory and gone home, I’m pretty sure the Iranians will maintain their grip.
On the Strait of Hormuz and they’ll allow some ships through and they’ll argue about the others and they’ll go into negotiations. They have discovered that they can actually play around with the Strait of Hormuz in a way that really affects the world economy. And in that respect, there’s no way back for them and there’s probably no way back for the United States and the rest of us.
Because this war is damaging everybody. And final point, the only two countries that will come out ahead in this war is Israel and Russia. They will do well out of it in different ways. I think the Americans will lose politically. The Iranians will lose in the sense that they’ll be on their knees, whoever is in charge after this.
And all the Gulf states lose, all the Europeans lose, the world economy loses. It’s not a good, it’s not a good thing at all. So there you go. That’s enough for that one. Let’s throw it open to questions.

Jack.Flaherty   1:17:04
Perfect. So we already have a few questions in chat, but I think I’ll ask the first one again. It’s just seems chaos like it seems like the strategy for Trump and and even to an extent Netanyahu is to create as much chaos as possible. And it’s, you know, it’s.
It’s interesting, you know, Netanyahu has this belief that he’ll be able to control if Iran changes, he’s able to control what comes out of it. Or the same with Lebanon. It it doesn’t necessarily, you know, what happens in Mahabru’s sense is never defiant and that, you know.

michael clarke   1:17:36
But.
Yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   1:17:40
Throughout history and it changes, you know, it can be one one force one day and then a completely different force the other day. So I I mean, is it just not this rational thinking beyond, you know, thinking of the short-term, it doesn’t seem like long-term strategy is involved in any of this.

michael clarke   1:17:59
No.
No, I mean, well, Netanyahu first, I mean, he’s a very wily operator. I mean, you’ve got to respect his sheer ability to survive and to find ways of surviving with in the most, some would say his critics say he’s absolutely, he’s despicable. But nevertheless he survives and you’ve got to respect that as a political operator. And he, I mean, he’s a risk taker. He’s always.
He’s taken risks all through his life and that goes back into his his background, his father and his elder brother who led the Entebbe raid. Remember, of course you won’t remember, but the Entebbe raid on on on Tebi airport in Uganda where they freed the hostages. It was a brilliant Hollywood-esque raid. Only one person was killed, the man who led it, who is his elder brother, who he idolised.
He was the only, he was the only man who died in the raid, the man who led it, and that was Netanyahu senior, his elder brother. So I mean Netanyahu is is convinced of mission. He’s a risk taker, but he always believes that somehow he’ll be able to manage it and he’ll find a way through. And always so far he has. So he has a record of of turning.
Everything to his advantage and pretty well to Israel’s advantage, whatever you think of the long term future of of Israel, which doesn’t look that great in in terms of the way they deal with the Palestinian problem. But Trump is different. I mean, Trump is a risk taker, but he’s not, he’s not remotely strategic at all. And I mean, I’ve just.
Launch.
And come back from a discussion with some ex military chiefs, some very senior ex military chiefs. And we were laughing about this because they said the Strait of Hormuz is is day one on the on the Middle East course, on on the staff colleges, you know, for naval officers, army officers, Air Force officers in America, in in the the United Kingdom.
He’s a TV man, knows nothing about defence, even though he was in the Marines. It’s a low level. He has no background in the policy of defence. He’s the Defence Secretary. Rubio. Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State, so he’s foreign minister and he’s the national security advisor.
I mean, that was a job that Henry Kissinger used to hold. You know, after a lifetime of experience in in diplomacy, Rubio’s got no experience of any of it, although he’s the most sensible of some of them. You’ve got Steve Witkoff, who’s, you know, a golfing partner and a property tycoon. He knows nothing whatsoever about the world outside.
Trump himself, who doesn’t read anything. He gets all his information from the television, and he only watches the television he likes, which is Fox News. He relies on briefings, and if he doesn’t like the briefing, he won’t read it or he won’t. He won’t even be told about it. And So what this war reflects is a complete disconnect.
Between the professionals in the State Department and the Pentagon, who know what they’re talking about, and the White House, who won’t listen to them, who won’t, won’t ask them and doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And I mean after, you know, after the Iraq war of of 2003, after Afghanistan of 2001, after Libya in 2011.
The initiation of this war so far has broken every single rule that those wars would have reinforced, and a lot of people are left shaking their heads. They say, how could you be so reckless and foolish as to initiate this war? Which is not to say.
It may not succeed because war is a funny thing. It goes in directions that you can’t possibly, um, appreciate. And I think personally, I think this war is running out of control now. I think that Trump is losing his grip on what is actually happening. The war is becoming uncontrollable. But you know, who’s to say that there won’t be a sudden collapse in Iran?
Of the government. I don’t think there will, but maybe there will because we don’t really know what’s going on. Maybe there’ll be a happier Iran emerge in a year’s time and everyone will say, well, you know, it was a hell of a risk. They didn’t really know what they were doing, but they got away with it. Maybe. Maybe that will be said. Much more likely is that the war will go down as a massive.
Aberation of a president that just didn’t do his homework on anything and was, you know, making decisions by impulse and may well, I I think this will be the legacy of the Trump administration. More than anything else he thinks he’s done. This will go down as his legacy, starting a war that he didn’t need to start in a way that was.
Chaotic and it’s continued to be chaotic.

Jack.Flaherty   1:22:36
One question from Kellum in the chat talks about the UN weakness over Mideast conflict. Does it simply expose the fact that it was never meant to override great powers interest only to operate within them?

michael clarke   1:22:45
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And that’s a good way of putting it. I mean, people ask me all the time, you know, people are not not like yourselves who are studying these things, but you know, the general public, they say, why can’t the UN do more? I say, well, look, the UN is an expression of world politics at any given time. And that’s that’s it’s that’s its success really, because the League of Nations failed.
In the 1920s and 30s because it tried to be something outside world politics. It tried to stand above them and tell them what they could and couldn’t do and enforce its its action. You know, the League of Nations tried to be a sort of a prototype world government. And of course it failed completely because when major powers began to misbehave themselves, the League couldn’t, the League couldn’t do anything about.
We had it, so it failed. The United Nations, when it was established at the end of the Second World War, said we must not, we mustn’t do that. We must avoid that mistake. So we must incorporate all the powers in the world, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with them or not. And for that reason, the UN is a universalist organisation. Nobody’s ever left the UN.
You know, everybody has joined. Some have not yet joined one or two strange cases, but you know, people, countries join the UN and nobody leaves. And that means that it is a it is an expression of world politics at any given moment. So when world politics are in quite a good state, the UN can do all sorts of things very useful when they’re not in a good state.
They’re not at the moment. The UN is stuck. And one final point on the UN. You know, everyone looks at the UN as if it’s all about the Security Council and the ability to run peace and war. But look at all the other things that the UN does, the UN family, I mean, if we got rid of the UN.
Today, tomorrow, we’d start making arrangements that in a couple of years time would look a bit like the UN that we’ve already got. We’d have to start making arrangements for international maritime traffic. We’d have to start making arrangements to organise international telecommunications. We’d have to start making arrangements to share meteorological information. We’d have to start making arrangements to think about.
Accurate information on the flows of refugees. We have to start thinking about how can we coordinate the defence of ancient monuments in cultural, scientific and cultural stuff. You know, the UN does an enormous amount of of work that you would you would want an organisation to do at the international level, because certain things can only be done internationally.
But the the peace and the war and peace issue, which is what really sits in the Security Council of 15 member nations, those 15, that is, that’s the bit that everybody looks at. But all of the other organisations which are functionally necessary, they you’d want them to carry on in any case.
And so the issue of who should we have a different United Nations really comes down to whether you could re redo the Security Council and allow one of the big powers to be outvoted. Say that the Russians or the Chinese say we don’t agree with this and everybody has said, well, we do, so it’s going to happen.
Are we then going to, who’s going to enforce it against China? You know, if we said, look, China, you’ve invaded Taiwan, we all agree you can’t do that. And we’ve passed a resolution and you’ve been outvoted. Are we all going to take, are we going to go to war with China to take back Taiwan? No. So you know, that’s where the UN is. It reflects world politics at any given moment.

Jack.Flaherty   1:26:03
Fantastic. Uh, Thomas, did you want to ask you a question?

Tomo Pierzchala   1:26:10
Yeah. And so once again, I think your perspectives are great because they put a lot of context into where we are and and how these things happen to be in that specific context. And I think there is a major context which tends to be missing from a lot of mainstream.

michael clarke   1:26:10
Hi, Thomas. Yeah.
Yeah.

Tomo Pierzchala   1:26:29
And it’s it’s generally for obvious reasons. So I’ll kind of explain. So for example, gold, the price of gold stock since 2017 until 2023, it’s gone up by 800 points from 2023 until today it has gone up by 4000 points, which means that there if you say invested a billion.

michael clarke   1:26:39
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Tomo Pierzchala   1:26:49
Dollars into gold in the last three years, you would have become a not a multi billionaire, but potentially you’d have money in the trillions at this point. Um, so that’s the first point and the second point being that the predictable.

michael clarke   1:26:51
Yep.
Yeah.

Tomo Pierzchala   1:27:06
Rising of prices after Israel has had the retaliation attacks on Palestine has stopped with the Iran war. So as soon as the conflict in Iran started, the stock prices went up for about half an hour and then it was rug pulled. So whoever invested a bulk has instantly withdrawn that bulk as soon as.
People started to predict that it’s going to go up. So there seems to be this type of manipulation, which I think Donald Trump is a mastermind. He’s got think tanks behind himself, which are able to potentially control where he places sanctions and predicting what kind of effects this will have on the stock market.

michael clarke   1:27:36
Hmm.

Tomo Pierzchala   1:27:45
This doesn’t affect other nations such as China or or BRICS as much as he would like it to, but it definitely affects the the middle and the the lower class populations who play on the stock market, which is a massive thing. We’re encouraged to do it.

michael clarke   1:27:52
Hmm.

Tomo Pierzchala   1:28:02
And so the final point being what the United Nations got brought up, I have had the the privilege of speaking to some United Nations experts about the the impacts, the real life impacts of the United Nations on the world.
And the thing that keeps coming up is moving goalposts. So Israel moving goalposts in terms of, you know, it’s it’s invasions and the genocide in Palestine, Saudi Arabia moving goalposts in terms of delaying slavery and and invasions in in Yemen.
And it seems that both these cases, both Israel and Saudi Arabia, hold, as you pointed out yourself, they hold massive wealth. So are we in a stage of of sort of political lifelines now that we as?
Citizens, we buy into corporations and these corporations buy into governments or become the the secret overlords who are able to move goalpost and and in your view, I suppose it’s kind of a big loaded question.
Um.
Is is everything that we’re seeing right now a potential show that’s been put on while in the background that the real, real war happens and it happens on the the trade and and the currency plane?

michael clarke   1:29:19
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I know what you mean. Yeah. OK, there’s a lot of stuff there to unpack. Let me just start with the goalpost issue. Yeah, I mean, the what the United Nations would say is, look, we deal with the art of the possible. You know, what can work because we’ve got to get through this. And remember also that the UN is is the home of lost causes. If people can sort out their differences or.
Sort out an issue, then they sort it out. When they run out of ways of trying to sort it out, they throw it at the UN and say we want the UN to mediate, we want the UN to do something about it. So the UN ends up as the backstop when all else has failed. So the UN is the home of lost causes and the UN then somehow has to think, well, you know, how can we just move forward? How can we keep people on board?
And that’s why the goalposts keep moving. And it’s very frustrating if you’re on the wrong side of that argument. But again, it’s a it’s a feature of the fact that the UN is trying to reflect world politics. If it stands aside from everything, it says, well, we’ve got nothing to offer, then people say, well, what’s the UN for? You know, what’s the point if the Secretary General said.
I can’t think of a solution, can’t think of anything to do. People would say, well, you shouldn’t be in the job then what’s what’s the point of the UN? So they keep having to come up with something to keep things moving forward. That’s the that’s the dilemma. Now then on the on on the sort of broader issue, you know, is the world really dominated by economic interests and all the political interests are just to kind of facade.
Hard on the top that kill lots of people. If it were that simple, we’d understand it better. But of course it isn’t. It’s an interaction of those things. I mean, there’s always an economic dimension to global politics, of course. There’s always an economic dimension to security issues. But honestly, Thomas, I mean, you know, I’ve been in this business a long time.
And even now, I’m sometimes taken aback by the sheer emotion that people and leaders are prepared to put into the issues of war and peace, that they will fight for a bit of soil. They’ll fight for a bit of land because it means something to them emotionally, even though economically it’s neither here nor there. And you know, people are.
Are motivated by things that are not remotely in their own economic interests very often, even though other people will do do only things that are in their economic interests. But it’s as you obviously understand, it’s very it’s complex relationship on the question of gold. You’re very you you take me strangely on that. I’m old enough to remember when.
Gold was $35 an ounce, right? And it was $35 an ounce for years and years and years in the in the era of fixed exchange rates. Because when the Bretton Woods system was established in 1945, the new economic system after the Second World War, they said, right, gold will be $35 an ounce and everyone’s currency will take their value from that.
And exchange rates are fixed. And if you want to change your exchange rate, which we did in Britain, again when I was a boy, there were $4.00 to the pound, four point something to the pound. The dollar was worth about 5 shillings and then 25 pence. And that’s why it used to be used to have a coin which called a half a crown, which when I was a kid, half a crown was big. I used to become half a dollar.
Oh, there’s half a dollar because it was half of five shillings, half of 25 pence. It was worth about 12 1/2 pence, half a dollar. So there were $4 to the pound for years and years and years. When we changed our exchange rate, it had to be agreed by everybody that Britain can now, you know, devalue, which we did.
And those fixed exchange rates, which are fixed to gold because that was the unit of value that everyone believed in. You know, gold is a constant source of value. And then when the fixed exchange rates finished in 1971, I think it was, and then the dollar floated in 1973, suddenly gold had whatever.
Value people wanted to pay for it and all currencies moved up and down regardless. And that was kind of important because it allowed much more flexibility in the world economy. But that means the reason that people run to gold is because they’ve stopped believing in the dollar. And that’s the point when you once they think that America is on a sort of roller coaster, which might be very profitable, but it might also lose a great deal.
Of money. Then everybody runs to, well, what is a fixed source of value? The gold. And so gold has gone to ridiculous heights. So is silver. So is so other precious metals. You know why these things should be so valuable? It’s just a matter of human psychology, really, because gold is relatively scarce.
It takes a bit of mining, which is why cryptocurrencies are now so popular because it’s so hard to to mine a Bitcoin. It is. It requires so much to mine it that it is a unit of value that people are prepared to agree with. So that’s why, I mean, gold goes up and down, but it’s gone. It’s gone shut up.
In the last couple of years, precisely because people have stopped having faith in the dollar as a unit of value. And you know what we see is in the markets, of course the markets are, some markets are very sensitive. So the oil market, the money market, the commodities market are very, very sensitive and people are always.
Of trying to get the best deals they can in 60 days time. And the reason they say, oh, you know, President Trump makes a statement and the markets go up or he makes a statement and the market’s for. How can that be? Because everyone’s saying if he means what he just said, then in 60 days time it’s going to cost me a lot more to buy copper. So I’ll buy it now rather than whatever the price is going.
So everyone’s trying to manipulate or anticipate what the cost will be in whatever 30 days, 60 days, 90 days time. You know the spot market for any commodity is always the market that you’re trying to buy on at some time in the future. So the markets are very.
Most of them, most of those that we’re talking about are very sensitive. And of course people make a lot of money. They lose a lot as well. And you’re absolutely right when you say the Trump administration has normalized corruption, because Trump thinks nothing of giving his friends 24 hours notice before he says something. And there’s a there’s a good article in, you know, there’s a journal called Foreign Affairs American.
Journal called Foreign Affairs. And there’s a good article in, I think it was the last month’s edition and I can’t remember who wrote it. 2 authors. But they talked about, they said the only thing that motivates Trump is business, is money. I mean, if if his pursuit of money coincides with American interests, then that’s fine. But it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, he does it anyway. And I thought, well, that’s a bit.
Strong.
As I was reading, I thought, well, that’s a bit, that’s a bit glib as an explanation. But then they laid out all the evidence and they gave the evidence of deal after deal after deal that was done by Trump’s family or Trump’s friends or Trump’s associates, which had an effect on the politics that that came around it. And they said no other American president would have dared to do this. They wouldn’t have dared.
To do it because they’d be all over the press for it. They’d be impeached for it. They’d be accused of corruption. But somehow, you know, American politics are in such a strange place at the moment that he gets away with it. I mean, in history, eventually he won’t. But for now, we’re in this, you know, bizarre world.
Where, you know, Trump is is something else. And I often say, you know, it’s very hard to work out what’s going on in his mind. And I’ll finish on this unless one other quick question. But I mean, I think I’m this, I’m just my impression, 25% of what he says is true.
And he’s important because he’s the president. And another 25% of what he says is not true, but it’s still important because he believes it and he’s the president. And about 50% of what he says is just drivel. It’s just presidential gobbledygook. It just it’s what he it’s what he thinks of when he gets out of bed first thing in the morning, just drivel. And the problem is separating.
Fading out what is true and important, untrue and important, and what is just drivel. And it’s all mixed in in this sort of haystack of his mind, which makes him a very difficult character to deal with. But there you are. I mean, you know, this, this, this, you know, and and America is not.
You know, the Trump phenomenon has got to be seen as a phenomenon. It’s not, you know, there’s always people like him around in politics. The question is how does one person get to the very top of the tree because of the circumstances that put him there? That’s the that’s the important thing. Not that he’s there. There’s lots of people like Trump, lots of people like Boris Johnson around, lots of people like Liz Truss around. The question is when they get to the top.
To the tree. What has happened to allow these people who normally are like drunks in the pub, you know, got an answer to everything. How do they get to be in charge? Well, there’s some phenomena behind that. And that’s what we’re looking at in terms of modern American politics. Anyway, sorry, I’ll stop going on about that now.

Jack.Flaherty   1:37:34
Perfect. Yeah, one more question. This came up earlier. What beyond, you know, Sky News and you mentioned Foreign Affairs, what news sources of students should we kind of be looking at and and what would you recommend?

michael clarke   1:37:35
Go on, Jack. You want one more?
Yeah.

Jack.Flaherty   1:37:49
For students to kind of get, you know, a better idea of how these these countries are operating, these leaders are operating.

michael clarke   1:37:52
Yeah.
Yeah, good question. Well, I’d say that one thing. I mean, by all means use all of the all of the social media because stuff often appears on social media, which turns out to be true. But of course it’s like it’s a lot of junk as well. So use social media. But in general, I think you should compare all your social media material with what I would call mainstream material.
And mainstream material is that which you can reasonably trust. And so you can trust the big journals like Foreign Affairs is the American one, another one called Foreign Policy, American Journal, the British ones, the two, the two that immediately spring to mind. One is International Affairs.
Which is the Chatham House Journal. And the other one is from my old institute, the Rusi Journal. That’s that’s more military than political, but it’s got a lot of very good stuff in it and it’s very, very accurate. And you know, I take some pride in making that journal much more carefully researched than the than its predecessors were. And so the.
Journal is good, but I’ll tell you there’s two other sources easy to get which I would really recommend. One is the Financial Times, the FT. You can get it online and and it’s really good. Or you can buy the the buy the hard copy and you know people have different versions of whether they like reading online or they like the newspaper, but.
And it’s a shame in a way. The FT is not a more general newspaper, but at times like this, you know where there’s a war going on. I mean today’s FT had four pages all about different aspects of the Iran war and you get detail there and a hard edged.
Honesty and truth that you won’t find in most of the other newspapers. Even the Times or the Telegraph can’t really be trusted at times like this. The Telegraph certainly can’t. The Times can a bit more, but the FT far and away the best. And the other thing is that the FT has great essays in the editorial pages, just the back page. They usually have three or four editorial pieces.
Which are quite quick to read, and they’re very good. I mean, there aren’t many days when I look at them and think, oh, there’s none of these I’m interested in. Most days I’m interested in at least one or two of them, maybe all four of them. And so that’s a really good source. And my final source for good students is Private Eye. You know, Private Eye.
Right. And the reason private eye is good. Now private eye is full of snide comments and unfair things and rude jokes and so on. But the thing about private eye and you can disagree with its tone or how unfair it is to politicians and members of the government and it makes you it makes you laugh. But the point about private eye is it’s full of it’s it’s facts.

Jack.Flaherty   1:40:06
Mhm.

michael clarke   1:40:26
Almost always right because, you know, people often say to Ian Hislop, the editor, you know, how do you, how do you get all this stuff? And he said people send it to us, whistleblowers, say send it in and we check it. And so somebody at the water company, you know, who says this is going on in Thames water, you couldn’t, you wouldn’t believe what Thames water’s doing. They send it in and probably check it out carefully and then they print it.
And although privatized has been taken to court many times for libelance and all sorts of things, they’re almost never taken to court for inaccurate information. And you know the number of stories that appear in the in the mainstream press which were in private eye two months before that.
Or we’re hinted at in private eye. And so in in in private, I mean, a lot of it is on domestic politics, but there’s always some good stuff on international politics or on British foreign policy or British defence policy. So that’s my that’s my sort of tip to my word to the wise. You’d be surprised how good private eye is at at the factual side you’ve got, you’ve got to either.
Laugh or dismiss the other stuff, but on the factual side, it’s good. So my main take away from this sources is in the modern world, anchor your anchor your social media stuff, which everybody has anchor it to some good mainstream sources so that you’re not always you don’t take it all from social media.
Who’s your mainstream sources? So the main press, FT, very good. The Journal’s very good. And I mean also the TV news is, I mean, you know, television news, BBC, ITV, Sky, CNN, CNN different because it’s American. But nevertheless, you put it in the same category. They are obliged by law.
To maintain standards of objectivity and they can be hauled over the coals and charged a great deal of money for not doing that. Now you don’t get that with GB News, you don’t get that with lots of the other satellite channels. But the mainstream BBC, ITV, Sky in Britain, you know, have got to maintain levels of accuracy and believe me, working for Sky, you know we do.
Work very hard to try and make us make sure that our material is factually accurate. So again, it’s it’s a sort of mainstream anchor to all of the other things that you naturally get from social media.

Jack.Flaherty   1:42:35
A great risk to resources and and Tom has posted most of them in the chat. Well, I want to thank you so much, Professor Michael Clark for coming out speaking to us. It’s been such a great session, really engaging. I really enjoyed this I think and I think many other members have too so.

michael clarke   1:42:44
No.
OK.

Jack.Flaherty   1:42:53
Thank you for taking the time for your evening and fantastic stuff.

michael clarke   1:42:54
OK, good luck with your studies, everybody. Good luck. I’m a great sporter of the OU. It’s a great organization. I worked for it years ago and so I’m always happy. Yeah, so well done. Good luck.

Jack.Flaherty   1:43:04
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Conway. So have a good evening, everyone. We do have an event later on at 7:00 with Jamie.

michael clarke   1:43:08
You too.

Jack.Flaherty   1:43:16
Forgotten his name, unfortunately.

Tomo Pierzchala   1:43:18
Jamie Allinson is senior lecturer at Edinburgh University at International Relations.

Jack.Flaherty   1:43:20
Yes, thank you.
Yes, so that.
That’ll be at 7:00. So if you could join us back then and then we have more events over the course of the week. So thank you everyone for coming out and see you next time.
Take care.

Jack.Flaherty stopped transcription