Episode 342: You Can’t Kill an Idea: War, Power and 40 Years as a Foreign Correspondent with Humphrey Hawksley

The global landscape feels increasingly unsettled. Conflict in the Middle East, Sudan and Ukraine to wider geoplitical, technological and climatic shifts, the world is going though a period of rapid change. At the same time, the nature of conflict and the way it’s reported has changed dramatically over the past few decades.

So today we’re stepping back to look at the bigger picture: how the global risk landscape has changed, how today’s conflicts compare to those of previous decades, and what today’s crisis might tell us about where things are heading next. 

Our guest today is one of the most experienced foreign correspondents in British journalism.

Humphrey Hawksley is an award-winning author, commentator and BBC correspondent whose reporting career has taken him to conflicts and political turning points across the world for more than four decades.

He has reported on the Sri Lankan civil war, on the Yugoslav wars, the War on Terror, the rise of many Asian countries with postings in Hong Kong, the Philippines and India, and he was even tasked with opening the BBC’s first permanent television bureau in Beijing way back in 1994.

Alongside his journalism, Humphrey is the author of several books on global politics and democracy, as well as bestselling political thrillers. He’s also the host of the Democracy Forum debates. 

You can find his books here:

Rake Ozenna Series – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0G4D7P7NX?tag=uklinktagbk-21&th=1&psc=1&geniuslink=true 

Future History – Third World War series – https://www.humphreyhawksley.com/future-history/

Asian Waters: The Struggly over the Indo-Pacific and the Challenge of American Power –  https://www.humphreyhawksley.com/book/asian-waters/ 

Democracy Kills: What’s so Good about having the Vote? –                https://www.humphreyhawksley.com/book/democracy-kills-whats-so-good-about-having-the-vote/

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime, to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

The International Risk Podcast is sponsored by Conducttr, a realistic crisis exercise platform. Conducttr offers crisis exercising software for corporates, consultants, humanitarian, and defence & security clients. Visit Conducttr to learn more.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. 

Transcript

If you look at Iran, and Russia particularly, their glory is in the past, but China’s glory is in its future. And I think that’s something we should bear in mind before we start trying to make China an enemy. You know, I think we should work as many ways as possible to work with it rather than work against it.

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And let’s jump in to today’s episode. Today on the International Risk Podcast, we’re joined by Humphry Hawksley. He’s a foreign correspondent who spent more than four decades reporting from wars, political upheaval, and the fault lines of global power.

From China and Hong Kong to Sri Lanka, Serbia, and the wider war on terror. He’s seen history created from really the best seat in the house. And in today’s conversation, we’re going to examine his reporting and what it can teach us about the rise of China, the challenges in Russia, the fragility of democracy, and whether the West is losing its direction.

Humphry, welcome to the International Risk Podcast. Very good to be here, Dominic. There’s a huge canvas you gave us for our conversation just now.

I like huge canvases. I think that keeps it interesting for our listeners today. But whereabouts in the world are you today, Humphry? I am in London.

I’ve just come back from Hong Kong and also just come back from Vietnam, where I was when the latest Iran war started. Fascinating, and we can talk about it later perhaps, looking at the museums of the Vietnamese fighting the Americans, seeing those communist flags still flying high amongst the government buildings, and the way the whole thing was portrayed by America and who won in the end. I couldn’t agree more.

For anyone that hasn’t been to a good museum lately, you need to go to the Vietnamese Museum in Phnom Penh. If you’re any sort of a serious person, you’ll sit there and just go, hold on, that’s not the same war that our families and our side fought in. It is incredibly interesting to read the history and of course, how the story is told about French invasion of Vietnam and then the American invasion of Vietnam.

You just sit there for a while and just start to feel a little bit uncomfortable about all the truths you’ve been told and the truths that the Vietnamese have been told and where the actual facts lie. I couldn’t agree more with you, Humphrey. You’ve spent four decades of reporting from different conflict zones and crises around the world.

Can you tell us a little bit about your life as a foreign correspondent and maybe even what you’ve noticed change throughout your career? Strangely enough, the idea to become a foreign correspondent started back in, I think it was 1973 or 74, when a cyclone hit the northern Australian town of Darwin. It was on Christmas Day and everybody was drunk and celebrating and we didn’t sleep at all. We were rescuing people from the streets, pulling drunks to safety, keeping our houses up.

I woke up in the morning and the whole town was flattened, except in Darwin, the house was built on stilts, so all the top bit was flattened and the stilts remained. I stayed there to rebuild, to help people out and everything like that. The press arrived and they would interview us and then you would see them in The Age or The Melbourne Herald or whatever.

I thought, this is quite a nice job. You fly into disaster, you meet interesting people and you become a little famous and travel, which I love doing anyway. When I got back to London after doing the Asia trip as a teenager, I got a job as a journalist.

I just haven’t looked back because I have a natural curiosity, I think, and what’s this person thinking? What are they doing? Why has this happened? Then, as you say, 40 years on or probably 50 years on now, however long it is, you look at it. Why has this person done this? Why has America gone to war with Iran? You’re using 40 years of experience of untangling what people say against what it actually means and that thing we call the human condition or human nature, that actually it doesn’t change. Love, hatred, loathing, jealousy, all of those things is what drives people to do and create the world that we live in at the moment.

What a fantastic way of explaining that, Humphrey. As you mentioned at the start, you were recently travelling in Asia. You were just in Hong Kong, in Vietnam.

In your 2020 book called In Asian Waters, you frame Indo-Pacific as a contest over sea lanes, over influence and about political will. Now, in March 2026, today, after a brief lull, Taiwan’s again reporting a sharp return of Chinese military aircraft and naval activity near the island. Now, whilst Taipei is trying to rush through a major UN arms purchases, if we look through the lens of your book and through your experience, do you think we’re seeing a deliberate Chinese strategy of trying to normalise coercion, trying to keep it below the threshold of war? Or do you think we need to start considering if this grey zone pressure is starting to evolve from signalling to actually being real preparation for a blockade or a forced reunification of Taiwan? I think it’s the former, Dominic.

I think that the way the Taiwan story is portrayed in the Western media is completely wrong, for a start. What it does, and let us put to one side the whole Middle East-Iran thing at the moment, after the whole Iraq and everything that day down, we got bored with the Middle East, is that we pivoted over to Asia and China. And China briefly became the big evil that we had to counter.

And Taiwan became the sort of symbolic catalyst of that evil. So here was this democracy thriving in an Asian culture that was being threatened by this big bag authoritarian regime. And that picture ebbs and flows backwards and forwards.

So here in Britain, we constantly get, you know, is China going to invade Taiwan and question you ask me? The answer is no, it’s not. And the reason it’s not right now is two or threefold. Firstly, it’s watching what’s happening with America in Afghanistan and in Iran and Russia and Ukraine.

And it says, we really don’t want to go down that road. Secondly, if it does invade Taiwan, and if global focus is on it and sanctions come in, it will be destroying the very markets that make it wealthy, because it sells to Europe and to the US, North America and all around the world. And this so-called multipolar world hasn’t materialised enough.

It’s not going to make up selling to Nigeria or Brazil what it sells to Europe. So it can’t kill those markets. So it’s not going to do that.

It has constantly said it is going to take Taiwan like the Communist Party took Beijing in 1949. And that was is that you surrounded, you put these under the radar cordons in just as you explained, and the people eventually will say, hell, you know, why do we have Nancy Pelosi coming here causing all these problems, but that’s a long term thing. And then there’s another more recent element that’s come in is that Xi Jinping, who’s been now in power for 14 years or 15 years or so, he’s recently been firing the top military generals.

It’s a purge that he’s been doing to get loyalty. You cannot run an efficient military that hasn’t had practise at war, and whose generals have just been fired. So it’s going to take several years for that command and control structure to get back in again.

So I think right now, long answer to your question, no, they’re not going to invade Taiwan, but they’re going to keep up the pressure. And we in the West are going to keep using Taiwan as this sort of symbolic flag of freedom that shows up China for being a nasty authoritarian state. And another one of the core tensions in your book is that gap between America’s power and America’s credibility.

And keeping in mind this book was written a few years ago, it’s even more interesting today. Now, Taiwan has recently approved, as I mentioned, the arms deal worth about $9 billion and potentially more to follow, but weapons are not the same as deterrence. Now, do you think the Indo-Pacific region has entered a more dangerous phase where Beijing is, as you said, testing and pushing on country’s resilience? But more importantly, when we consider Washington’s resilience to maintain this Western-led, this democratic regional order, is that something that we should be more concerned about? I think I’d push back, if I may, on your word dangerous and concern.

I think that because we use this terminology in the West, when I say we, I don’t mean the West, we sort of paint a natural rising power rivalry as something that we should inevitably have to defeat or go to war with or contain. Now, there’s very little evidence that we need to do that, except for the one that we can get to later in that the West always needs to have an enemy or America needs to have an enemy. But let’s put that to one side.

I think that very naturally, what democracy has delivered up is Donald Trump. But Donald Trump is what the people wanted. When I was writing Asian Waters, he was in his first tenure in office, and he could have been a sort of oddball, okay, that we made a mistake with a couple in Britain, you know, we won’t be electing them again.

But he’s not an oddball because he’s come back. And because he’s come back, the nations of Asia know that they have to now take more control of their own destiny, that America is not a reliable ally. And because of that, Japan, particularly South Korea, India, the sort of big beasts, Indonesia, are looking to see how they can have a long term relationship with China, so that China is no longer going to be their enemy, but China is going to be a collaborative power within the region.

When we in the West look at these issues of democracy and freedom against authoritarianism, the European way of looking at that comes from a different origin to the Asian way. The European way is based out of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the United Nations that came out of that and all of the human rights and that. Asia is very different to that.

It doesn’t have the luxury of most of sort of fair courts and tribunals and institutions like that. And most Asians just muddle along knowing that they’re going to have, they’ve got a corrupt military regime or a fascist religious regime or some incompetent billionaire that’s in charge. And they just work out how best to weave their way around that.

And this is a two totally different mindsets. And it’s also why America now and Europe has got Asia wrong in what it’s been trying to do. So for those business leaders and policymakers that want to get it right, you’ve spoken about it as not so much a collection of isolated flash points, but really just one connected strategic system.

What should they be watching next? Is it what happens in the Taiwan Strait? Is it more broadly across the South China Sea? Is it Japan’s security posture? Is it supply chains? Is it US alliances across the region? What is going to actually matter? What should they be watching if they want to understand the environment? I mean, the European cultures are held together with a different glue. We apparently share values. There’s something there, democracy, this value that holds us together.

There’s no common value in Asia. They call it the Indo-Pacific American strategic term. Let’s say there are 40, 45 countries in there, depending how you measure it.

Only three have become fully developed economic democracies. That’s Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which technically isn’t even a country. The rest of them, as I’ve said, you have a Buddhist next to a Muslim next to a military dictatorship next to the ramshackle democracy that India or Indonesia or the Philippines is, but they’re not fully developed democracies.

The one thing that binds them together is trade, and trade has always done that. The reason that Indonesia is the world’s biggest Muslim country is because Muslim traders went out there and settled there. The same with Malaysia.

So anybody that wants to understand the Indo-Pacific, don’t say you need to be human rights, you need democracy, you need trade. When you have trade, you then need laws in place that makes that trade happen. You need supply chains that stay open.

You need security, not just for an electoral cycle, but for 10 or 20 years. That is really what they need to focus on. Speaking about what we need to focus on, you’ve, of course, being a foreign correspondent in nearly all the news at the moment.

It’s very difficult to read the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and not have to read at least 10 articles about Trump’s and Yahoo’s war in Iran. Now, you’ve reported extensively on the war in terror and across the Middle East. And I think when I compare the current conflict in Iran with other conflicts in the region, one thing that really stands out to me is the lack of even modest attempts at making illegal invasions look legal.

Now, George W. Bush Jr. at least made the attempt to make the invasion of Iraq look legal using terms like preemptive self-defence and weapons of mass destruction. But the Trump, Netanyahu evasion of Iran was clear that it was illegal under international law, yet the world has remained largely silent on this fact. And I wonder if Washington is seen to be weakening the rule of law internationally, but also at home, how much does that damage its ability to actually deter China, to deter Russia, and to deter countries like Iran around democratic values when America is not upholding the rule of law itself? And I think Reuters did some really good reporting about growing clashes between the Trump administration and the courts, and of course, Trump and Trump allies.

So what are you seeing? What’s your opinion of the weakening of the rule of law in America and how that impacts us all internationally? I think it was weakening anyway, mainly because of what the US had been doing and what Trump had been saying about invading Greenland and wanting Canada and all the rest of it. And I think that it took us by surprise the amount of power an American president actually has. You know, there’s meant to be a checks and balances, and they seem to have gone completely out of the window at the moment.

But I think with this latest war initiated against Iran, the international rule of law is no more. And what will need to happen, it might be a good idea if somebody started doing it now, is that you’ve got a number of things going on. You’ve got the Taiwan thing that you’ve mentioned, you’ve got Iran going on there, you’ve got Ukraine still going on.

We are in a situation where we need to have another big idea, like the United Nations after the Second World War. Look at all these element things together and say, okay, we need to fix it. Russia and China need to have a bigger say, and there need to be a rebalancing of the world order so that those countries that feel that they haven’t got a big enough seat at the table, get a better seat at the table.

You need to fix Ukraine, you need to fix Taiwan, you need to fix Iran. You need to stop this fixation that America has of falsely claiming that nations are getting nuclear weapons and then going to war with them, because it’s happened twice now in our lifetime. It’s almost as if it’s some sort of false thing up there that you say, oh, well, he’s getting a nuclear, we have a right to bomb them.

But they didn’t bomb Pakistan, did they? That’s an Islamic state. They sanctioned India and Pakistan, but they didn’t go to war with them. So they’re just going to war with people they don’t like.

And in the case of Iraq and Iran, Iraq tried to kill George Bush Sr. So that was a sort of personal motivation. And then there’s the whole of the Iranian revolution and the hostage situation in the embassy, and there needs to be an equalisation of that. And there is this element in the American psychology, which is they don’t like to have a win situation, particularly with an enemy.

It has to be a win-lose. It has to be Clint Eastwood going into the town and killing the bad guys and making the town a good place. And that is why America, well, in my career, there were two agreements.

There was the framework agreement in the mid-1990s that was aimed at preventing North Korea getting a nuclear weapon. That was torn up as the war on terror was being launched for no real reason, just, you know, we’re not dealing with these people we’re going to crush them. And then there was the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, 10 years ago, which was a perfectly good deal to make sure it wasn’t going to get a nuclear weapon.

Why were they torn up? The Republican presidents tore them up, and now North Korea has a nuclear weapon and there’s war in Iran. For some of our listeners, they might be wondering if you’re advocating for the Trump-created Board of Peace, whether with some of its members, is that the new idea that you think we need? Well, I’m not advocating for that. But I think, Dominic, there has to be, if we go back into history, right back to the Westphalia and those various treaties through European history, there’s always a war, lots of slaughter and destruction, and then people get together to work out a peace.

And that peace might last for five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever. Why don’t we try and do it before the big war this time? You know, we know it’s coming. We can see all the trends.

So why don’t we just say, okay, let’s stop and put it together. Now, there is a precedent for this, because in the 1950s, the Korean War, which was the first hot war of the Cold War, as it were, that had a ceasefire in 1953. And then there were negotiations in Geneva that were going on to stop it.

In 1954, the French were expelled from Vietnam. And after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, they just tagged the Vietnam thing onto the Korean peace talks, and they expanded that conference into something. So you could put Ukraine, Taiwan and Iran, just put all those issues in a room together and see what comes out of the funnel, not based on any electoral cycle or anything like that.

But having given you that example, I’ll just push back on my own advocacy here, because part of the Vietnam agreement in 1954 was that democratic elections would be held in 1956, which would then unify the country. But because Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist leader at the time that was leaning towards the Soviet Union, he would have won a landslide. So what did they do? They cancelled, the Americans cancelled the election.

So no, we’re not going to happen. And this has happened time and time again. In Iran, 1952, a nationalist leader won the parliamentary elections there.

There was a VP who thought it was going to lose its oil thing. So the CIA and the MI6 instigated a coup that brought in the Shah. And I’ll just give you to finish the pushback against my own advocacy.

It’s in 2011, the Arab Spring, the Morsi, the president that came to power in Egypt, was part of the Muslim Brotherhood. He didn’t last long. And now they have a military dictatorship again.

So this flag of democracy or flag of authoritarianism, it’s nothing. It’s just symbols. And I will encourage anyone that’s not a student of history to really look at some of those things about Iran did have a democracy, and we removed it.

And that led to the situation we’re at today. So we’re not always as clean and pure and not always good guys as we like to think we are. And talking about being the good guys, one thing that I’m really struggling with, Humphrey, and it’s easy to throw mud at Donald Trump and politicians and really any politician that criticises the decisions they make.

But there’s been a lot of talk that the US doesn’t really have a clear game plan or exit strategy. And Trump’s stated purpose of the war in Iran really seems to shift on a day-to-day basis. Now, you could argue that’s his deliberate tactic, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

It really does to be shooting from the hip. It does appear to be underestimating Iran’s capabilities. It appears to be a failure to recognise the damage that it could cause to the Gulf states and the global economy.

And now we’re seeing this embarrassing situation where Trump is demanding that allies come and help him keep the Strait of Hormuz open, and they’re saying no. So what do you make of that? Is it possible to make sense of this situation where a war could have been launched by two countries with very impressive militaries? Whether you like them, whether you like what they’ve done, Israel and America have very impressive militaries and very impressive military leaders. How could they launch a war that seems to not have a defined political objective? Yes, very good question.

I don’t have an answer to it. I think like you, I hope or hope that they do it. But then having done the Iraq war, when actually we think that there was a more mature leadership in, we think that they were more forward thinking and the rest of it.

And actually they weren’t. You know, I remember driving through Iraq and going all over the places and, you know, there was no government there at all until they then said that they’d have to get involved with nation building. But then the insurgency started.

This idea, rise up, chance is yours, bring in a democratic government. This concept that you get rid of a bad guy and then a panoply of institutions will float down from heaven so you will have a fire brigade that works and a telephone company that doesn’t rip you off and a police that is completely non-ethical. This concept is still with us.

So the think tanks or the universities or the whatever’s have come up with all these papers and either they’re not read, which they’re probably not, but the politics supersedes the reality. And how many people are they killing? I mean, I just saw that the Israelis have now say they’ve killed somebody. I mean, you keep saying, well, we’ve killed X number of people.

We’ve killed X number of people. We’ve killed X number of people. I mean, anybody that might’ve read these Vietnam books or Graham Greene’s The Quiet American or anything like that.

And you went to the five o’clock follies in Saigon and they claim their victories by the number of people they’d killed. And I remember as a young reporter going to the island of Holo in the Philippines, which was the hotbed of the Muslim insurgency of the Philippines at the time. And we drove through various ceasefire checkpoints up into the hills to talk to these insurgents that were so, you could tell they were ramshackle because they each had a different type of rifle and each of those rifles had a different type of ammunition.

So, there was no way they could hold a firefight once one of the rifles had run out of ammunition. But the guy said to me, he said, look, you know, they can come in and kill us, but you cannot kill an idea. And we have this idea and you’re not going to kill it.

We can moderate it as long as we’re treated with respect. And what’s happened with Iran? What happened with Iraq? In Iraq, I’ll just tell the story. I was in Iraq interviewing just after the invasion.

There was a house full of people and I got lots of people from the military together. So, there was a general and an air commodore and a young tank commander and somebody from the special forces and a few others. We were all sitting around and I was doing an interview with them.

And in the middle of this, news came in that Paul Bremer, who was the US chief executive that had been flown in there, had announced that he was disbanding the Iraqi army. Now, all the guys around me, they weren’t ideological. They were military people.

And the general said, well, what’s going to happen to my house? This is where we were sitting. And the air commodore said, yeah, what about my pension? This sort of went around. They weren’t thinking evil Americans or I’m going to fight for my country.

It was about the basic day-to-day needs of their career that they were talking about. And then the young tank commander, who had actually been commanding a tank as the Americans had come in and surrendered or something, I don’t know what he’d done. He got up, put his rucksack over.

He said, the commander said, where are you going? He said, we knew this was going to happen. I’m off to join the insurgency. And that was the beginning of, you know, he went off and they went in there.

They stripped the military of any status they had or income or they said all these words of these very well-trained guys. And they all went off and started this insurgency, which lasted for five, six, 10 years. I don’t know, it’s still going on probably.

And then gave rise to ISIS and Al-Qaeda and boosted Al-Qaeda and all of those things like that. So they’re not thinking it through. They didn’t think it through back then.

And there’s no evidence that they’re thinking it through now. If they believe that the Iranians can rise up, strip out all the institutions, take on over and produce a democracy, forget it. And I don’t know who plants these ideas in their heads.

And I wonder, beyond Iran’s retaliation, Israel’s military campaign has involved large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure and entire neighbourhoods. There’s been mass displacement, raising very serious humanitarian and legal concerns. We just look at Lebanon alone, over 800,000 people have been displaced by Israeli attacks.

And Israel, the defence force there, has threatened to level entire areas of Beirut and Southern Lebanon so that they resemble Gaza. Of course, as I asked this question to Humphrey, I’m conscious that whenever I ask a question about Israel and a question about the International Risk Podcast website gets hacked within about 24 hours, I’ll be interested to see what happens tomorrow, I say with a roll of my eyes. But from your perspective, as someone who’s reported on war for decades, how should we be thinking about the question of proportionality and humanitarian consequences? And I’m not defending the Israeli army.

I’m not defending Hamas. I’m not defending Hezbollah. But I’m talking about proportionality.

I’m talking about humanitarian consequences and the rule of law. But in modern conflicts like this, we’re seeing so many of these things occur with seemingly no consequence. Vladimir Putin, for example, has arrest warrants out for him, and yet he was welcomed in America by the U.S. president on red carpet with U.S. military standing at attention to him.

How should we be thinking about wars today? Well, I think it goes back to what we were talking about before. I think there needs to be a new United Nations charter, in a way, this word proportionality. Like other words, like genocide and that, have been taken out to mean something that they’re not.

Even democracy doesn’t really mean democracy anymore. So without getting into the moral pros and cons of what’s going on, I think the question is, is it working? So if Israel goes in and flattens southern Lebanon and displaces millions of people, or if they bomb X number of 7,000 targets I hear they’ve bombed in Iraq, is it working? I don’t think it is, because you have what’s called horizontal or asymmetric warfare now, which Iran is doing seemingly quite cleverly in that it’s put a question mark over supply chains, it’s put a question mark over oil, it’s put a question mark on the whole of global trade in that it’s disrupted it. And what America has done is that it hasn’t managed to get rid of the clear material.

Nobody quite knows where that is or what its effect is, and it’s just flattened lots of buildings and they keep killing these Iranian leaders. But as Trump himself says, well, they’re all dead. Yes, because more are coming up and they can keep killing them, but they won’t kill the idea.

And I think if we go back to the late 1990s, when we bombed Belgrade, NATO bombed Belgrade, Milosevic, the dictator at the time, was on his last edges, he was just lashing out. But the bombing campaign of Belgrade made a cohesive national thing behind him, so that the people that were wanting him out were sort of saying, no, you don’t bomb our country. And I imagine a similar thing is going on in Iran at the moment.

This is our country. This is an illegal war. No, we don’t like this regime that just killed tens of thousands of protesters.

But also, we don’t like another country in bombing it. We have to sort out our own problems. I think that’s very, very valid, very good lens to put on it.

And of course, the question that all journalists, historians, academics love being asked is, if we look ahead, Humphrey, how do you see this war continuing? How do you see it unfolding? What concerns you about the potential paths that the war in the Middle East could take today? I mean, that’s a tough one, but I would say that this war will fizzle and Iran will remain under sanctions, the bombing will stop, Israel will go back to its element there. So during our careers, Dominic, you know, we have seen Lebanon flattened before, we have seen wars in Gaza, and we’ve seen this is just notching it up a level. The key issues wouldn’t have been resolved.

And the key issues, the ones that were actually being resolved is that Saudi Arabia was about to recognise Israel, and that needs to be put back on track. And what we’re seeing quite interestingly, that you mentioned before, is that unlike the coalition of the first Gulf War, and even Iraq, there was a bit of that, you’re not getting countries coming to America’s side, and it’s just Israel and America. And in much of the global south, which has got a much bigger voice than it had 20 years ago, these are the bad guys.

And I think that when history is written as much as well, is that there won’t be a good guy or a bad guy in this war. And there wasn’t a good guy or bad guy in the Iraq war, except now there was, Saddam was the bad guy. But I’m not sure how much the Iranian institutions are going to be held up.

They’re not great, but are they any worse than America? Let’s remember that when this was all being planned, there were ICE agents on the streets in Minneapolis pulling people out and two getting killed on the street.

And I just mentioned that just coming back from Vietnam and and and and and Hong Kong, the these the these places are the lifeblood and essence of the future. Because in China and in Asia, everybody’s looking towards the future. And if you look at Iran and Russia, particularly, their glory is in the past, but China’s glory is in its future. And I think that’s something we should bear in mind before we start trying to make China an enemy. You know, I think we should work as many ways as possible to work with it rather than work against it.

And I’ll take this opportunity Humphrey to remind our listeners that if you prefer to watch your podcasts, the International Risk Podcast is available on YouTube. So please go to YouTube and remember to search for the International Wizz Podcast and please do subscribe and like our content. It really is important for our success.

Now Humphrey, one of your first postings was actually to cover the civil war in Sri Lanka back in the 80s. And I understand that you were actually expelled after revealing atrocities against civilians. Now, when we look at the Middle East today, we see censorship in Iran. We see British citizens arrested in the UAE for posting photos of of damage. We see very strict censoring in Israel. We see the US president verbally attacking journalists that ask him questions that he doesn’t like the sound of.

Is this just the same censorship that you saw in the 80s or is it different today? And then follow-on question from that that I’d love to hear is how confident when you see the younger and the newer journalists coming in today, are you feeling confident that they have the robustness and the drive and the curiosity to work through this censorship? Because there is so much white noise right now. Do you feel that we’re able to get the real news, the real stories that we need to be hearing?

If I can answer your first question first, I’ll try not to forget the you’re the last question first. I’ll try not forget the first one. I think that that the that journalism as such is in a much more robust ah situation now because of our technology. the citizen journalists, the clips that if I go to my Instagram reel feed, I can get the clips of Trump speaking or the the Iranian foreign minister speaking and all this sort of thing without having to wade through.

And I think some of the young journalists are ones that are out there now, the freelancers that started off almost as I started off, tagging on, helping CNN, BBC or whatever it did to their careers. I think that they’re as gutsy as anybody is gutsy. I think in my day when I was thrown out, the Sri Lankans didn’t like me reporting their human rights atrocities on the Tamil Tigers. um And that is in a way that the the Secretary of War or Defence Ward, Pete Hegseth, was lambasting journalists for not reporting how he wanted stuff to be reported.

So I think that you’ve got a problem there in that in that the the so-called free speech and the democracies of the West are thinking that they can control the journalists and that and in my case you know interestingly is that yes the Sinhalese government was being absolutely appalling going into villages and shooting dead lots of Tamils but because of that atrocity The Tamils then became the most violent and vicious terrorist group in that they invented the suicide vest. They blew up airplanes. and They became a cult that had to be completely crushed. So one of the things I’ve learned from that is there are no good guys and bad guys in these things.

I mean, as a reporter, one of the the other elements that’s coming out from your your other question is that a lot of the reporters are now becoming columnists or opinion makers and not just straight reporting. And I think that is a problem that we’ve got because then you or I get into our silos, or whether you’re pro-Iran or anti-Iran or anti-Israel, pro-Israel, you’ll go into the pro-Israel silo and not hear anything else.

I definitely think that’s a concern. You know, I like to and I deliberately read a little bit on the far left, the far right, the centre. But I do find some really great newspapers are more and more these days taking a stand on a political side. And I find that quite uncomfortable to read a lot of content from good outlets and good journalists. But they’re clearly taking a personal opinion on things.

But as we come towards the the close, you’ve written some some really interesting books. And one of the things that some of our listeners might be interested to know is where we’re doing a lot of internal debates within the International West podcast about whether we should be having a discussion about third world war and there’s a lot of credible non-conspiracy theories like academics politicians policy advisors talking about that and i note that one of your fiction books is about the third world war as well as the arctic so i wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how you merge what’s happening in the world today and when you’ve written these books about the arctic about third world war and any potential links between the fiction and the non-fiction world

Well, I think the fiction, nonfiction is that as a journalist, you feel a little constrained. And as a kid, when I was growing up, what the teachers were lecturing me sort of went in one ear and out the other. But if I got hold of a James Michener’s book on Alaska or Leon Uris’s Exodus or something, you had me captured. I did do a book called Third World War. It was during the Iraq surge, actually, it was after Iraq, and then the Third World War happened. Well, what’s interesting there, Dominic, now is that the nations that were involved in that, there’s China, Russia, India, UK, US, basically, those nations are characters, and they’re not going to change their character.

So what we’re seeing now is Russia being Russia, Iran being Iran, China being China, America being America. And after the Berlin Wall came down, the end of history and all of that, America thought everybody wanted to be like Americans. And I had a diplomatic briefing once. It was a bit before that. it was during the Glasnost period and in the Philippines. And the American diplomat said, Humphrey, you just got understand that inside every Filipino, there’s an American wanting to get out. And we’ve just got to help them on that path .And this was after the first people power revolution. Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown. His son saw now the president. And I covered, I think it was seven or eight attempted coups by the military because they didn’t understand what democracy was. This is panoply of institutions that that I was talking about. And the thriller series that I’ve got at the moment is actually came out of the Crimea thing 10 years ago, but it’s based, the hero comes from the US-Russian border.

And this is a border between two antagonistic nuclear powers. And I opened the book and I thought I should go there. And I thought it was like 50 miles of Arctic territory separated. them It’s not. There’s two islands there. And those islands are less than three miles apart. And on one of them, you’ve got a native Alaskan village. No police, no military, nothing to suggest a borderline at all. And on the other side, you’ve got a a Russian military base. And this was one of those political things where the Americans bought Alaska in 1867, but nothing much changed. Everybody kept crossing the border. Then during the Cold War comes down what they call the Ice Curtain. So there are families that were on the Russian side and families on the American side could never couldn’t meet anymore.

Interestingly, the base in Anchorage, which is where Trump and Putin met, that controls and safeguards that border, and they have specific rules of engagement. And during the Cold War, almost a dozen American aircrafts were shot down. Not once did the Americans respond. They absorbed the hit in order not to have ah you know have it elevated up to a world war. If Russia wanted to make a point, it could walk into any Alaskan island and take it just like that.

But one of the interesting elements that’s almost coming out now is that over the past 10, 15 year, Vladimir Putin has been building up the Arctic. He’s modernized or built new Arctic bases right across there. America has done absolutely nothing. China has created icebreaking freighters and coastal boats because it sees it wants control of the Arctic there as well.

This is going to be a battleground at some stage. Nobody quite knows when or how, but the whole Trump wanting to take Greenland is part of that. It’s part of America wanting to get more control of the Arctic and then Europe pushed back on it, rightly so. And now we’ve got a bit of distraction to the Middle East, but it’ll be back on Greenland again soon.

And when you look around the world, Humphrey, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

Whoa

I would say, and I’ve said this before, the Iran thing is the American Congress or the American decision to go to war. ah And the reason I say that is that the the wars of choice that it’s taken, mainly the Vietnam, they had the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was a fabricated incident of an attack by a Vietnamese warship on an American warship. It was fabricated, but that gave congressional action for the US Marines to come ashore at Da Nang, where I was a couple of weeks ago, looking at that whole thing there. So that was fabricated. The Iraq war was fabricated and because there were no weapons of mass destruction. And the intelligence basically said that they weren’t either. i mean, I was working with the UN and people around there you know People said it that it was a bit dodgy. And the reason that Sudan sort did that over it was because it would have shown weakness if he had actually said you know or given in or something like that. So it was a sort of muscular, you know chauvinistic thing to do. Iran, quite probably a similar thing. There’s certainly, there was you know people, far greater access to me are saying this is that there was no imminent threat from it.

So I think, and China is not going to start a crisis. We discussed that earlier on. It needs its markets. It needs to build up its military. It’s not there yet to do it. Russia has shown that it’s going to, you know, only go so far and it’s not going to do any more there. So I think the big risk is the risk of of this war particularly being made into a more, or America doing something. and And I think this throws this question mark over democracy. I mean, democracy is meant to keep us secure and wealthy and sleep in our beds at night, but the elections of certain leaders in Europe and in America has shown that the way that democracy now operates, and that a lot of the systems haven’t been modernized, they need to be modernized, is not doing that, It’s creating maniacs.

Those maniacs do not keep us safe in bed at night. So the whole democratic city, the electoral college in the US, proportional representation, of a House of Lords here in Britain, and a raft of things have across Europe, which which you know more about than I do, ah it needs to be modernized so that the vote of the people actually creates the people that are going to create the wealth, create the security and create the standards of living that we vote for.

Very, very good. and I couldn’t agree more, Humphrey. Thank you very much for articulating that. And thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast today.

Thank you, Dominic, it’s been a pleasure. You’ve made me push back against more of my arguments now.

Well, that’s good. I think we all need to do that. And I think your reporting, Humphrey, and your analysis really reminds me and hopefully reminds our listeners that, you know, the world isn’t this completely random place. It is volatile, but it definitely is something that’s less forgiving of poor judgment and and and shallow analysis and and self-delusion. So I think any sort of pushback we can do on each other is something that we should all be encouraging.

I agree with that. I’m not even going to push back on that.

Well that was a great conversation with Humphrey Hawksley. We’ll link to some of his books and his work in the show notes below. So please do have a look at that. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Anna Kummelstedt. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days.