Burnham and Carney vs. Trump, and the Diana Dispute

Rory Stewart (0:01)

We're recording this as world leaders gather now in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Andy Burnham, the British Prime Minister, is preparing for his very first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump. And across Europe, governments are confronting Russian sabotage. In Germany, the far right and the far left have just dominated elections. And countries like Canada are looking for new alliances as the old Atlantic order becomes less certain.

And at the center of all this sits the United Nations, an institution created for a very different world. For 80 years, we've talked about a rules-based international order. But what happens when the rules are no longer agreed, the great powers no longer trust each other, and America itself is questioning the system it once underwrote. So what is the United Nations actually for now? What should it become? And if the old order is disappearing, what institutions can still keep the peace?

Alastair Campbell (1:01)

Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, we're here to meet Alastair Campbell.

Rory Stewart (1:03)

And me, Rory Stewart.

Alastair Campbell (1:05)

So Rory, we're going to talk a lot about the UN. Andy Burnham is there today, lots of world leaders are there. He's got his first sort of big meeting with Trump.

But also, what's the UN for? Is it functional? What's its future look like? Who's going to lead it after Guterres, of whom you're not a massive fan? And we're also going to talk about whether you like it or not, the Charles Spencer attack upon your friend, the king. It sort of feels incredibly both consequential and inconsequential. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. I watched Guterres talking about his priorities for the summit, for the UNGA. And he said, he set out three, runaway artificial intelligence, climate change, and growing inequalities. Okay. And he said these were existential threats, plug for Rory's new mini-series. And he then said, and we need to work hard towards peace in the Middle East and ending the war in Ukraine. And as he said those five things, I thought, yeah, he's probably right. But the UN's voice in that is, well, it's sort of, I can't even use the word weak. It's like, what is it? Where is it? Where is the UN place in all this? And of course, we can all criticize, as you and I do, Donald Trump's endless failures on different specific policy areas. But he set the strategic goal to weaken the United Nations. And he's done it.

And it's with consequences.

Rory Stewart (2:21)

Yeah, I think the first thing is, US weakened it in a very straightforward way.

Alastair Campbell (2:26)

Money?

Rory Stewart (2:27)

Yeah. And many of these agencies received almost half their funding from the US. So when the US stopped its funding, there was complete crisis in all these agencies.

Alastair Campbell (2:35)

And they still owe up to nearly 4 billion.

Rory Stewart (2:38)

Right.

Alastair Campbell (2:39)

Whereas the Chinese have actually paid their dues.

Rory Stewart (2:40)

Right. And owing 4 billion, which one imagines under Trump, they're not going to pay. He's not famous for paying his debts. And then you've introduced the second point, which is, of course, as the US contribution goes down, the contribution of China, the other major economy in the world becomes more and more important, and raises the question of what the UN is for. And this will become more and more important as we get close to hiring a new Secretary General. My sense of it is the UN has probably been through three phases and is now looking for a fourth. Firstly, set up after the Second World War, where I think if you were Churchill Roosevelt Stalin or Churchill Truman Stalin, you thought that really it was going to be a way of bringing the great powers together, the people who eventually became a Security Council, the great powers of those days policing the world together. Then they got an awkward shock in the 50s and 60s when it suddenly turned out that all these new countries joining the UN turned out to be considerably more independent than people thought. First shock was when Nehru put formal criticism of South Africa on the agenda. And then you had this amazing guy, Uttant and Doug Hammerskjold. These were two really interesting figures who made the UN central to peace. Doug Hammerskjold on Suez, Uttant on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Uttant, of course, a relatively mild-mannered, middle-aged Burmese civil servant turned minister, who suddenly became a rock star celebrity in New York. And there's a lovely book about him by his grandson, Tamminu, a really lovely account of that. Then we fast forward to the period where you and I, I think, were mostly dealing with the UN, which is the period after 1989 So America emerges triumphant. And at this point, the UN goes from being something that's doing niche peacekeeping to a much more expansive vision, where it's going to be doing human rights, governance, peace and security all over the world. And it's part of a general story that, in the 90s, the whole world is, and you can see it in the data, every year there are fewer refugees, there are more democracies, there are fewer conflicts, right?