Cut down to size
Further to my previous post, I thought I was being interviewed by World Radio News for a rather longer feature but I was wrong.
Instead it was a four-minute report on a 30-minute news podcast so my 20-minute ‘interview’ was edited to a soundbite of less than 20 seconds!
You can listen to it here. The item starts at 24:20 and also features contributions from Caroline Cerny, deputy chief executive of ASH, and the IEA’s Chris Snowdon. Scroll down and there’s a helpful transcript. In fairness to World Radio, it was a short but well balanced piece with no editorialising so I can’t complain.
As it happens, though, there is another item that may interest you on The World and Everything in It podcast and it concerns the King’s visit to Washington DC. Asked by presenter Nick Eicher to comment on whether the "current state of affairs” between the US and UK is just “normal diplomatic friction” or “something deeper than that”, here’s what political commentator Hunter Baker had to say:
I think something deeper. You know, NATO was really a response to the end of World War II, and then the advent of the Cold War basically put in place to deter Russia and and maybe the additional designs that they might have for the expansion of the Soviet Union ever since the Cold War ended at the beginning of the 1990s you kind of have to wonder, what exactly is this thing? I mean, to what degree does the United States need to be bound up in the affairs of Europe in a post Cold War world?
And so I think that over time, American presidents have pushed for Europeans to deal with more of their own security. But nevertheless, we have borne most of the weight despite the fact that the population of those European countries is significantly larger than the population of the United States. And so Donald Trump, of those American presidents, Donald Trump has been the one to push hardest on this issue of Europe doing more, including England, to protect themselves. And so when we are doing something internationally, and when we perceive that those NATO members, including England, are not helping us, or are ranged against us, then that brings about a lot of resentment, and I think that that's what we're facing now.
And the English have to be very careful, as do the rest of the Europeans, because, on the one hand, they don't want to just sort of be, be a puppet of the United States. They don't want to just kind of back our play anytime that we decide to do something. But at the same time, they really need us, and the English in particular, they like to play up this special relationship. It benefits them a lot more than it does us.
And so what I see with King Charles coming is an attempt to kind of build up that idea of the special relationship and the goodwill. And there is something to it, right? I mean, Americans do respond to what's happening in England and English royalty in a way that we don't for other countries, you know, whether other European countries or Mexico south of the border. So there's something here, and I think that King Charles is trying to cement it or hold it together.
Interesting to hear an American viewpoint on this. Again, you can read the full transcript here.
