well this is a good question um uh the actual fallout from the war in the west， i think is unclear i don't think that there will be a see a big change of mood in support for the ukraine i think that is most likely to continue.
But whether to what extent people in the west will pay are willing to pay the price for that i think is a
much more difficult question because um you know uh really there's a big economic crisis
brewing in the west now because of this huge increase in prices that is taking place
mainly oil and gas but not only oil and gas so we're back into an inflationary situation
um and i think that that's going i think this kind of can economic convulsion
is going to result in a lot of predict political volatility and unpredictability
and i wouldn't really like to say well it's going to go this way or going to go that way i think it's very difficult to say at the moment what's going to happen
i mean clearly in the short run the most obvious political effect has been to galvanize
the western alliance in a way we've not seen since the end of the cold war that is a new phenomenon because
actually the phenomenon in the relationship between europe and the united states since 1991
has been at the end of the cold war has been a process of slowly a gap opening up steadily between europe and
the united states i mean there was an interesting opinion poll about a year ago um uh uh sort of after trump uh
european attitudes towards the states and they were very you know they were more negative than they've been at any point i suppose since 1945.
um and now i think that that that that's reversed i mean the most dramatic example of it is the
country that's been actually in my view the most sensible in europe for a long time which is germany and germany has
now uh decided you know that um uh a support of the war effort is gonna
increase its military expenditure by a lot i mean this is common now across europe countries are going to spend more
a lot more the german is talking about i can't remember what the figure is um uh uh it's
i think it's 100 billion uh 100 billion euros on defense i mean this is germany has been you know in essentially quite
pacifist in many ways uh in its foreign policy so i think it's very difficult to say you asked me about
biden in the united states could biden get uh return i think this is difficult i mean you know i think there are a number of factors playing
biden is very old now and he comes across as very old so whether he can you know whether he can win the election on
the on the back of a war which is you know it's not even it's got two years before the election
so um so whether whether he can win it i don't know i mean it is true that by the way
that you know and i've written about this and talked about it that this kind of polarization of american politics which
uh was underpinning you know which was such a dramatic feature of what was happening in washington dc
um there's one issue on which there are two issues now on which america is not divided
one is china and the other is the ukraine so um
so uh i mean i think i would have to conclude from what's happening so far that
you know the russia's action has had from the point of view you know of
of of
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europe and the west a very negative very negative consequences because it's such it strengthened the position of the united states it strengthened the old
western alliance um there's been a lot of negative consequences coming from this and now you've got an economic crisis
now in the long run what exactly i you know i can't i can't predict uh what the longer term
uh ramifications uh are going to be um uh i mean if if
if if germany for example if they decide this is one possibility that uh if if
if if european countries which are very dependent like germany above all on russian oil and gas decide they're not
going to have it anymore i mean that is going to lead to huge economic problems in germany huge huge
in britain not so much because we don't get so much about we don't get much oil from russia and we don't get that much gas
i think it's about 20 10 or 20 maybe 10 percent but something quite small relatively speed
oh i think it it's actually very straightforward um i think that uh germany and uh
for a long time since the cold war but especially under angela merkel had sought sort of you know the old sort of aus
politique uh to find a way of uh working with russia and an acceptance of russia and
the need for coexistence with russia but i think that for german politicians and german people i
mean you're not just talking about the politicians uh there was a red line and the red line was
you know russia can't start invading countries and that's what's changing that's
that you know no one thought this was possible actually and i think that's why there was a reluctance to believe that american intelligence which proved very
accurate actually uh that putin was going to invade i don't europeans didn't couldn't didn't really believe that that was going to happen
nor did the ukrainians by the way i don't think um but it did happen um and i think that's what then
and then germany was left uh in a very difficult situation where basically its foreign policy
that he pursued for quite a long time fell apart in that situation and germany became you know like france
like britain i mean there were two two figures in in in two leaders in uh
in europe uh uh macron and schultz who really tried to find a way of immediate
reaching out to russia before the invasion and they've both been very weakened by this
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well i have to say to you that um there's overwhelming opposition in the uk uh to
the russian let's call i'm gonna call it an invasion or military action um in ukraine um and i think it's been
uh a really big shock actually for people because the people aren't used to that in europe i
mean of course europe used to be um the continent where you know there were sort of non-stop wars over a lot very
very long historical period but since 1945 and especially since the cold war
finished we haven't really experienced anything like that so it's because it's come as a huge shock to people
and um and you know seeing the pictures on the television uh in a european country of this happening
has really uh had a huge effect on public opinion not just in the uk
but across europe i mean really has led to a very very big political shift across
europe um uh toward against russia uh i i i i think that
it's very different in other parts of the world um i know it's felt very differently uh in east asia
um and they i think people probably feel uh more neutral about it
in other parts of the world um and feel quite remote from it um
in fact it's quite a reversal of the normal situation because generally wars have been taking place
um around it not in europe but in other parts of the world notably in the middle east
and the attitude towards of europeans towards those is you know i mean
it's somewhere else so even the iraq war eventually there was huge opposition to the iraq war of course in britain and and other european
countries but it took quite a time for that to really build up but people don't feel the same connection you know i think this is
partly a kind of racial mentality to be honest with you you know this is you know a white people in a european
country so they can relate to it whereas if it is involved in yemen for example where the death toll is hugely greater
they don't relate to it in the same way so i think that's a that's an important observation to make to try and understand why
europe feels so strongly it's also there's also a certain element of what i should call me a myopic attention to the
war you know and because if you go back to before the cold war then europe was the epicenter
of the world because the cold war really the the the line of division in the cold war was through germany through
the you know the berlin wall and so on that was where the old iron curtain was so europe until that moment was the
center of the world and now that of course as soon as the cold war came to an end that whole picture changed
there were underlying changes that were already create you know leading to that but the most important was china and the rise of east asia so the center of
gravity of the world has shifted to somewhere else it's certainly not in europe anymore i mean europe is now much less important than it was previously
but this war has sort of you know been a rerun of
historical experience uh the division is you know between you know russia and europe russia and western europe and the united states so it's to some extent there's a sort of it's a kind of return to what it seemed to be before with europe being at the center of things.
