Start the Week

Security threats and future prospects for Britain and the EU

Sir Alex Younger is the former head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. He assesses the evolving security risks facing Britain in the 21st century, and how the country continues to build strategic partnerships and intelligence agreements in a fracturing world. Younger ran MI6 during President Trump’s first administration and reflects on prospects for ‘the special relationship’ in the second.

With tensions between the US and China, increased economic protectionism and the war in Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas, the Head of the Europe Programme at Chatham House, Armida van Rij, believes European security and economic prospects appear fragile. And this comes at a time of political polarisation throughout the continent.

After Britain finally left the EU in 2020 following the Brexit vote it was feared that it would be Britain that was isolated and vulnerable. Not so, claims the journalist Ross Clark, in his forthcoming polemic, Far From Eutopia: Why Europe is failing - and how Britain could do better (published 23rd January 2025). Clark pinpoints the absence of economic growth and huge disillusionment about high migration throughout Europe, and how Britain is surpassing many of its former continental partners. But questions still remain about how Britain will fare – on its own – on the global stage.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Duration:: 46m
Broadcast on:: 09 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

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And I imagine it's quite often a job that falls to sea, otherwise known as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The currency, Sir Richard Moore, recently announced that the world was in a more dangerous state than it has been in four decades, and that the threats facing Europe could hardly be more serious. His predecessor, Sir Alex Younger, agrees, arguing that it might be time to rethink the very definition of being at war, as a 21st century Britain faces new forms of terrorism and the new kinds of enemies. So, what are the security risks? And how will we form strategic partnerships? And intelligence agreements in a fractured world. We'll be asking him and our leader Van Wai, the head of the Europe programme, the think tank, Chatham House, who is leading their research into the future of the EU. But what happens if an incoming president of the United States pressures Britain to choose between allies? Not a difficult choice for our third guess. The journalist Ross Clark, whose forthcoming book, Far From Eutopia, argues that Europe is failing, and Britain could do much better facing elsewhere. Before we get to that, let's talk about the security risks. That the statement from Sir Richard more a few weeks ago, last night, tumultuous events unfolding in Syria, new opportunities for some new risks for others. So are we living through the most dangerous time in 40 years? Why is that? And what do you think those threats are that we are facing? Alex, you're better placed than most to talk on this. What do you think? I think two things about this. So the first is that it's not so much that we are now in extremely dangerous times, as that the last 40 years were extremely peaceful. And I think we were brought up during that time, and thought it was the future. And we thought democracy had won. And in fact, really, all that was about was a unipolar moment. America's strength and its willingness to use that strength, to underpin the system it created. In Europe, particularly fatally, we confuse that with having won the argument. So the recent part is a very, very bad guide to the near future. And I think, and in literal terms, therefore, my predecessor, Richard was comments, are absolutely correct, as you would expect me to say. This by contrast is a much more dangerous time, because it's multipolar and geopolitically contested and complex, and not what we're used to, where Britain is not a status quo actor. But compared to longer back, my mother was born during the Second World War. Her mother was born just before the First World War. In fact, life is ugly and difficult. I think the thing that does put an exquisite twist on our current circumstances, though, is that accompanying this process of fragmentation and increasing ideological competition, paradoxically, has been a deepening of connections and connectivity. So even as we move apart from each other as blocks, the connections between us deepen. And the problem we've got as democracies is that we have a set of rather sort of bourgeois considerations, legal, cultural, political, institutional, which separate out different lines of activities between, say, peace and war or domestic and international or cyber and real, whereas our autocratic opponents are very happy to ignore those distinctions and those boundaries. And we'll single-mindedly pursue their security objectives across the spectrum in situations that we will regard as peace and situations we will regard as war. And we're very, very badly constituted to deal with it. So the most sort of call to arms that you referenced early wasn't that we put ourselves on some kind of, you know, martial footing. It was that we in the West work out how we deal with a chronic threat to our integrity and security, regardless of whether we're in a state of peace or war. And I think that's the category challenge for us now. It's a total change of mindset. Let's find out more about that in a moment. Amida, Richard Moore, is specifically talking about the threat to Europe in his statement, the domain of your research. I mean, I think Europe faces numerous threats at the moment, but they are systemic. And I do agree with Sir Alex here about the kind of chronic nature of those threats and risks. To put it slightly more concretely who I'm thinking about and talking about is, of course, Russia, is, of course, China, which I don't think everyone in Europe has quite got to grips with in terms of just how much of a threat they are to Europe. And I mean, there's lots of other factors, but the other thing I do want to mention is climate change, where that is undermining the factors in which we have built our societies. I mean, I am part Dutch. Half of the country will be underwater, put it quite frankly. And we've already seen this play out. So it's these kind of state-based threats, together with compounded with non-state threats, together with structural factors in the environment that make this quite a troubled time. Already starting to feel quite worried here. Ross, where do you aspire to the threats? Well, like Sir Alex, I was brought up in the latter stages of the Cold War. And I get a bit skeptical when people say, "Oh, we're now facing more dangers than we ever have done before." Because, you know, I remember that time and we were only, you know, five minutes from nuclear and annihilation and so on. But it does seem to me that there's a whole layer of vulnerability has been brought into society, our society since that time, in the form of the internet and everything now being connected, all telecommunication systems, our electricity systems and so on, all potentially hackable, which has brought sort of this new dimension of war, cyber warfare, if you like. And, you know, you can look up the size of Britain's army, how many tanks we have, how many aircraft carriers we have. But, you know, the question for Sir Alex, actually, how do we measure our cyber warfare capacity, a cyber defence capacity and also possibly our offensive capacity if we needed to respond to that? What do you think of it? It's pretty simple, really. When I was Chief of MI6, I only had one dominant feeling in my mind, which is that it must be that the technology that was invented by democracies in the west, nets out as an advantage to democracies in the west, not to autocracy. And there's nothing intrinsic in these technologies that says that it's on our side, but we've got to make it so. And that ultimately boils down to the comparative rate of innovation that we have as open societies, relative to closed societies. The thing that it takes that choices my children have is that, whether who runs the future of our digital world? Is it the top-down version, positive by autocrats, or the bottom-up open version that we esteem? Obviously, there's lots of other things in play, but that's at the core of it. So I think there's organisational technological capability, questions that we must answer, but the big one is our innovation ecosystem, and our capacity to innovate faster than our potential opponents. That's wide open, I think. Cyber attacks have become quite commonplace, I think. Many people listening might recall the synonymous cyber attack this summer targeting and NHS blood work data is. My data was stolen in that hack. I didn't think of it as an act of war. I thought of it as a nuisance. And I know you're not saying we should be on a martial footing, but we do need a change of mindset, I think you're suggesting that Alex, so should I have regarded it differently? Are these things that need to be taken more seriously by the general public? It's such a good example of that, because who would have thought that the NHS was a security issue, many other issues, but it isn't that. And yet, Britain has avowed offensive cyber capabilities. We have a national cyber force, you know, we're in that business. But it means nothing if our basic economy and public sector aren't resilient to cyber attack. You could be in a position where you cut the fibre connectivity to the UK and debilitate our capabilities a long time before anybody's having a war. Destructive cyber attacks could undermine the NHS. Tomorrow, if we're not careful. And this is stuff that becomes much less likely to the extent that we take it seriously. So my question is, are we? I mean, do you want us to come in? I agree with what's been said, but I think we also need to think about the range of threats, which range from the high spec that we've been talking about in the cyber domain, but also to the super rudimentary end of the spectrum. So if we think about some of the things that we've seen recently in the Baltic Sea, you know, the accidental quote, unquote, damaging of fibre optic cables, whether that's an anchor being dragged over the seabed or deliberate sabotage, we don't know. The point is that we, I think we need to think about the impact. And so Alex mentioned resilience there. And I think that's the kind of key element there. We need to think about how we make our critical infrastructure more resilient, but also that that has to be backed up by our populations and our citizens. And so I think, as you rightly say, the language we use when we talk about some of this is very unhelpful. The language that was used around lots of interference and sabotage in Northern Europe over the summer was about, you know, it's a nuisance. It's annoying. It's an interference. We don't talk about it as acts of war, which is what they are. Well, let's, let's, we'll back a moment because I mean, maybe this is the issue. If war is no longer only about nation states declaring Armageddon, then how do we know when we are at war? Look, I mean, I think just to the last point, which I absolutely agree with the way you set it out, there is one trap not to fall into, though, which is not to do the Russians job for them. And it's, you know, quite a long time. Things go wrong in my life and I find myself blaming the Russians. The reality here is that their capabilities are more in their absence of boundaries than what they actually possess. I think it could get worse and get more, more difficult. But I think that what we need to do is send serious and measured messages to our populations about the need to be resilient, but also confidence that the capabilities do exist for us to do something about this at the same, at the same time. I don't want to artificially amplify their power, but we do need to take this seriously. Yes, shall we, shall we talk about Syria? You've been talking to Alex on the today program this morning about regime change in Syria. What impact will this have on our security? Well, there are some closing issues for the UK and Europe to contend with, specifically the existence of a very large number of detainees and their families left over from the destruction, very welcome destruction of the ISIS caliphate in 2016. But where there is no solution has been found and where these people are being kept in increasingly degrading conditions and probably being increasingly radicalized. They've been kept specifically by the Kurdish groups in the East, and it's a big problem for us if that changes. I think I will have a direct effect on the threat. It also, Erdogan in Turkey has formed when it comes to weaponizing the issue of migration. And if Syria goes wrong and lapses into civil war, then that situation is going to get worse and it will be felt in Europe. But of course, the sort of much bigger issue is about the shifting power dynamics in the Middle East and the consequences for all of us have yet more chronic instability in a major country. That war didn't end in Syria. It was frozen by Russian bombs and Iranian Hezbollah infantry. They've gone off the job because of Ukraine and because of the Gaza conflict. So the war's back now. A huge amount depends on whether the actors can somehow reconcile into a cohesive blocs which can provide governance to Syria. I wouldn't rule that out. I think Jelani is key to this and he's changing, but he was very much a member of al-Qaeda at the start of his career. That's an issue. The big message for me is that changing countries at the point of a gun and imposing democracy from outside is never going to work. We need to work through actors that have influence inside Syria and actors in the region, specifically Turkey and Gator. And we need to proceed with some humility. The Western record in Syria has been a byword for unintended consequences. We'll be monitoring this. We'll be talking about alliances and partnerships too in a moment. But if you, Alex, were advising the new government, what would you be telling them to do now, to shore up their defenses for the future? In the context of Syria or all of that? Perhaps generally as well. Well, I think there's the issue of resilience, which we've covered already, and that's about money and it's about organization. But I think as you're saying, it's also about culture, actually, and just believing that this could happen. And of course, the exquisite paradigms are the more that we believe something's going to happen, the less likely it is to happen. But that's what we want. And that's why the, for instance, the conscription debate gets so interesting, because that's about us putting skin in the game, where we've regarded military and security conflict as something that other people do, a bit like a professional football team. It's a step change. But the other thing that's about to happen is Donald Trump's about to turn up. And we'll talk about this more, I'm sure, in a minute. But almost the first thing he's going to do is reinterpret NATO article five, the mutual defense guarantee, as an insurance policy. And he's going to say, you only get out what you put in. And if you're not paying X percent on defense, then you don't get article five protection. He said he's going to do that. And that's what's going to happen. And I'm ambivalent about that, because I really don't want to see alliances reduced to transactions. But actually, he's called a point. And that's going to change the nature of Europe. And it's going to put a serious rocket under our willingness to develop our military industrial complexes. And it's going to do so not before time, even if I don't approve of the methods. You've already mentioned the Trump in the room, Alex. And Ross is nodding along, you want to come in? Yes, I don't, I'm going to say that Trump is not exactly the diplomat. But when he came to the NATO summit in 2018, and essentially said, well, US is getting a bad deal out of NATO. And also that Germany was becoming too reliant on Russian gas. He was absolutely right. And he was proved right, wasn't he? And at that time, there were only four NATO members, which were spending two percent of their GDP on defense, which, you know, they agreed to pay as members of NATO. And one was the US, about three percent, then was Britain, Greece, and Estonia, and Belgium, which hosted the conference and was, you know, boasting about, they dumb, the chef had grown his herbs in his garden, and so on, all this sort of thing. They were spending less than one percent of GDP. And I think Trump actually did us a huge favor in 2018 when he said that and made us a little more prepared, actually, for what was to come. Amida, what do you think? What are your thoughts on, on, on the, the NATO situation and the, the second copy of President Trump? So I think, I mean, I think there's, there's multiple elements. So, so Alex already talked about NATO, the implications for NATO's Article 5, which obviously is a huge concern. I think the defense industrial piece is the interesting one, but also the concerning one, because there's a slight contradiction of play there, which is that on the one hand, I think what we will end up seeing is a bilateralization of relations between European countries and the US as they essentially try to buy Trump's support. As we heard, you know, Trump is transactional and we know that. On the other hand, we really need to develop a European defense industrial base. And I don't just mean that in any EU context, it has to be European, including Norway, including the UK. That bilateralization that I talked about undermines the development of the European defense industrial base, because I think we'll end up seeing in practice is European taxpayers' money being spent on American defense companies creating jobs in the US to build American weapons that we will buy off the shelf, rather than developing our own capabilities. So I think that's a concern. There is some thinking about, you know, as we do this, can we open this up to third country participation again to appeal to the US, within the EU, I should say, again, to appeal to the US and to Trump that would also have advantages for the UK, because I fundamentally believe that we cannot do this, we being the whole of Europe, without the UK being plugged into those systems. But I think there's also something, I think we've we've all slightly forgotten, well, I certainly have forgotten what it was like to have Trump in office. You know, every single morning you'd wake up and something else would have happened. And that's going to be the same, but on steroids, this time round. Well, I mean, Sir Alex, I think it doesn't forget what it was like to have Trump in office in 26, because you were at the helm of MI6 during that term. Are you able to tell us anything about the UK's approach to that administration then? And do you think we'll see more of the same from him in terms of security or? I think, well, look, I was there last time, I'm not there this time, but time has elapsed self evidently. Trump, I think, is changed. In some ways, his approach can be less chaotic and more organised. But I think he's going to discover very rapidly. And as this conversation's already illuminated, is that the complexity of the problem sets gone up, everything is now connected to everything else. You got North Koreans and Russia in New York, Russian military in Yemen, et cetera. It's extremely hard to segment things and just do stuff in a way that I think his mind is configured. So there's a scope for a conversation with Donald Trump. All I would say last time is that essentially the connectivity that exists between our two countries, particularly the deep state connectivity and the security and defence space, was resilient to all of the political voltage that was being put through the system by Donald Trump's idiosyncratic nature. We had confidence in that fact. The things we wanted were broadly speaking, the things that the American security establishment wanted. But I accept, in some ways, Trump defines himself against that establishment. So there's nothing to be sanguine about here. But it did work last time. I think your analysis has been that we are returning to an older world view and you've described this as the difference between Yalta and Helsinki. Could you say a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, that's a slightly philosophical approach to the same issues. Here in Yalta, you've got the Treaty of the Second World War, where a group of powerful countries disposed affairs of small countries over their heads, big deals, spheres of influence. Helsinki, which obviously came shortly after, was a set of treaties that gave equal rights to states, regardless of their size, and that fundamentally underpinned globalization. Let's be sure that Britain was big on the Yalta stuff. I'm pretty happy to go around telling other countries what to do. But our recent prosperity is invested absolutely in the Helsinki world. And as a very open economy, a member of more, an outstanding Brexit, a member of more international treaties and organizations than any other country in the world, we're very invested in that world. That is not Trump's world. He's about to give Putin something Putin wants, regardless of the situation in Ukraine, which is a conversation, a great power conversation. I'm confident that would be his approach when dealing with Xi, as well, who is another strong man. They want a great power conversation. We can have a big moan about that. We've got a certain amount of time left in the program. We can spend it all having a moan. But my view is that the UK needs to work out that it's got strengths in this conversation and vulnerabilities and demonstrate an agility that we've kind of lost because of the slightly ossified nature of our position in the recent past. There's plenty of us for us to deal with it. Well, I might need to have a little moan about it because I mean that the return to that yelter worldview is one that seems inimical to the Europe that you're imagining and researching and trying to plan for. In what sense? In what sense? In the sense that it's three large states ruling over the majority of deciding the futures of much smaller space states and you're looking at a different model here. What is pretty clear? I mean, if we talk about, if we hone in on the EU for a second, the EU is a reactive actor. That's when it's best at times of crisis. We saw that in its response to Russia's full civil invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in response to the COVID crisis, in response to the Eurozone crisis. That's when it kind of acts swiftly, decisively, and usually through forces of great integration. It is not very good at getting on a front footing, which is exactly what we need at the moment, if we're going to think about Trump, if we're going to think about China, if we're going to think about all these other trends and factors that we face. In part, that's just because of the nature of the beast. There's 27 member states who are, I mean, just to take a second on domestic politics. Not every EU member states signs up anymore to the idea that the EU institutions and integration is a way forward and is a good thing. If we think about Victor Orban, if we think about Fizzo and Slovakia, not everyone subscribes to that idea anymore. There's this difficulty where there's external threats to that idea, but there's also internal threats where some of these actors want to hollow out the EU from within, and therefore make it less able to respond to these threats, and that's the irony of it. I think we need to find out more about that complex picture of Europe from you in a moment, but I want to look at in more detail for a moment at your book, Ross, because the argument of your book far from utopia, how Europe is failing and Britain could do better, is that Britain isn't doing great, but it's doing better than the rest of Europe. But one of the very surprising things about your book is that although it's very much an argument for the independence of Britain, you confess early on that you voted Remain in 2016. So what's changed for you in the intervening eight years? Well, I thought, I mean, I sometimes feel I'm the only person in the country who thought there were good arguments on both sides, and I was probably 50/50, but I came down in favour of Remain, partly because I see it be very disruptive, and partly because I didn't want Britain's departure to rupture the EU, and we find Eastern European countries going back towards the Putin's influence, which is perhaps what's happening anyway. But my argument is that we have this idea that the spun by people, remoners, remainers, or whatever you want to call them, that Britain is languishing behind why the EU is sailing off into the sunset without us. And it's never been true, the falsehoods, which you sort of get, every time we had an empty shelf during a global pandemic, it was interpreted as a sign of Brexit. Every time we have a bit of bad economic news, when we had inflation, and so it was all to do with Brexit. And of course, if you look across the channel, other countries are neighbours, they're suffering exactly the same problems, low growth, high inflation, ageing population, all of which is putting stress on it, but on stress on our societies. But then you look across to America, and I'm instinctively European, I have no desire to go and live in America or something, there are severe problems I think America has, and lack of a public health system and so on. But even so, it's impossible to ignore this gap that has opened up this century between economic growth in the US and economic growth in Europe. And year by year, that gap gets bigger. And if you don't have the wealth, then you struggle with the public services, you struggle with defence and so on. And somehow, the EU is falling behind, and we've got to ask why. Well, our media has just started to draw a portrait of a complicated Europe, but our problem, you Ross say in your book, in terms of our sense of Europe as Britain's, is that we suffer from something you call holiday syndrome. What do you mean by that? Well, holiday syndrome is well, our impression of other countries tends to be formed when we go abroad, and for most of us, when we go abroad, we're on holiday. And you know, we remember that lovely meal we had in the restaurant in the door doing. We don't sort of pick up that France is just as much into fast food as Britain is, and there's a lovely statistic that I put in the book, which is that in present Macron's hometown, Emil, one quarter of the businesses there are fast food restaurants, and it's not something we associate with France. You know, the France is this great country of great food and civilisation where they, and you know, it just simply doesn't bear out with reality. So that's what I mean by holidays. In the opening to your book Ross, you write that the campaign for Brexit, I'm quoting here, the campaign for Brexit was calm, and for the most part played out in debates in village halls. But in the run up to the referendum, a city member of Parliament, Joe Cox, the member for badly inspired, was murdered by an extremist. There's a wider point here I want to make about the tenor of public debate since the Brexit vote, which is often heated and feebral, just tune into question time on a Thursday night. So how do we come to a consensus about matters like security in that kind of culture? Well, what I was referring to when I said, you know, the debate was largely carried out calmly, was relative to how issues of nationalism, migration, and so on are conducted in many other European countries. And it seems to me that the the whole coverage of those subjects, it creates a lot of emotion in Britain, but the debate is far less rancid in Britain than it is, you know, saying the Netherlands, in Germany, where we've got extreme right parties. We don't have really a functional extreme right party in Britain, which is, you know, incredibly partly to do with our first past the post system, of course, it's very difficult for new parties to get established. But, you know, when you look across Europe, Britain actually stands out oddly for not having a far right party. I mean, you're listening very patiently. I wonder what you're making of this. I mean, I think that there's a couple of things there. I think the first thing to say is that I do think it's still interesting as, you know, a European, I think it's still interesting how much time and airwaves are still dead or airtime is still dedicated to discuss Brexit. So many years after the fact, in the UK, on the continent, that just doesn't happen anymore. And even in kind of, you know, 2017, 2018, 2019, when the debate had long moved on on the continent, in the UK, they were it was still front front page news every single day. The EU's got bigger fish to fry, to be completely honest. I mean, no, but seriously, they do. There's a war on the European continent, as Rose Frightly identifies, there are huge issues around economic growth, around competitiveness, around industrial policy. You know, there are there are few blocks that you could imagine, you know, losing an economic power the size of the UK and then embarking on the next wave of enlargement. So there's there's all these kind of, the EU has moved on and is kind of trying to, trying to address these challenges. I think what's difficult in the UK, and I see this when I speak to government officials and politicians in the UK, is that Brexit is still so toxic and that prohibits any kind of constructive conversation about a more constructive relationship with the EU. So there's still that fear of, you know, the Daily Mail headline of, oh, the new, the UK government is seeking closer alignment with the with the EU, or the UK government is going to open up, is going to return to freedom of movement, even if, for example, the youth mobility deal would not be anywhere close to that. And that then hampers the inability or the ability to have a constructive discussion on the things that are needed, which is close to cooperation on defense and security in particular, because they're so afraid of that Daily Mail headline. So I think that whole debate is still so toxic, unhelpfully so. So Alex, you've been listening. You're posed rather like Rodan's thinker right now. So I'm intrigued to know what you are thinking, because you are not a champion of Brexit. You are not in regard to the implications for security at the time. But looking at the political landscape as it stands, where should we be looking now for our partnerships? The reason I'm looking philosophical is that I think that this is sort of bigger than Trump and bigger than Brexit. It's really about the fact that this process of multi-polarity and power going east has been a company by the reduction in inequality between these blocks has been accompanied by an increase in inequality within blocks and within countries. And the bottom 50% in most established liberal democracies have experienced a double whammy of power and jobs and money going east and an increasing inequality within their own countries. And just don't buy into globalization anymore. And it's got the point now where I think the legitimacy of established governments is being threatened. And that's how you get Trump and that's how you get Brexit, etc. I think this has got to be addressed. That's my first one. My second point is it's all about innovation. I've already said that. And my biggest worry about Europe is it's just stopped innovating. Why it sort of poses as a regulatory rather than the inventory power. I mean, nuts. My third point is, therefore, that the UK in these circumstances, I wasn't a fan of the idea, but now we're in the madest situation we could possibly be. I think inevitably, because I think the proponents of Brexit didn't explain the natural consequences of their idea. Indeed, the bus was alive. But inevitably, no government has managed to follow through on Brexit and reorder and restructure the UK economy, such that it's configured to take advantage of this new world. And that's just being forced on as you can't be a large European style, big spending, big state outside the EU and miraculously expect the growth just to keep going. And guess what? It hasn't. So Ross, I absolutely take your view that Europe's got its own problems. I'm really worried about the innovation situation. And I sort of now agree, really, that we need to double down on our strengths, which are considerable. It's about to be a trade war between Europe and the US. Well, guess what? The UK is 85% services. Do we really need to get involved? And you look at the things we've got, the creative industries, life science, football, financial services. It's all around services and the English language. It's all doubling down on the stuff that really works for the US. I actually think, given our security offer, that we can now have a constructive relationship with Europe, as well as leaning into the economic logic of the United States, I think that's doable. We may well screw it up, but there is an opportunity. Can we narrow our attention to Ukraine for a moment? And perhaps to you, Armida, the EU response to the Russian invasion demonstrated urgency and solidarity, but also fractures within countries like Germany. And this has to do with energy, doesn't it? Tell me about this. So, the EU's initial response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was strong. You know, two years on, two and a two and a half years on, we are seeing that the cracks are beginning to show. For reasons that I, you know, outlined earlier, not everyone is on the same page, but at the same time, we're also seeing this increasing support for Eurosceptic populist parties on both the far right or the far left end of the spectrum, but who also in some cases are supportive of Putin. And that's the real concern. I mean, you know, staking a step aside from what these far right parties may mean for the domestic politics when it comes to Ukraine is really dangerous. Some of them are in power, like Orban, like Fissel, in Sweden and in Finland, they are, you know, in a governing coalition. But interestingly, that's what a dividing line is. They are actually quite against Putin. But if we look at Marine Le Ben, if we look at La Liga, which is in Italy, which is not Maloney's party, but still in a governing coalition with her, they are all very, very supportive of Putin. And so especially as we go into this next stage into 2025 with Trump coming back to the White House, where it's quite clear that US support for Ukraine will not continue in the way that it has over the past two and a half years, the EU and the rest of Europe will need to step up to the plate. That's going to be made more difficult with these kind of Putin-leaning leaders in parts of Europe in place. Yeah, I mean, it's intensely complicated. At the beginning of the program, you mentioned climate change as a risk to you. And we've been talking about the conundrum of energy and Putin. But Alex was talking about innovation earlier. And this is my question, where does Europe look for energy security? Well, so I mean, as Ross talked about earlier, you know, Germany was hugely dependent on on Russian gas. The EU significantly diversified after Russia's full-scale invasion. It still imports some Russian LNG, so liquefied natural gas. It gets 48% of its LNG from the US. Actually, the rest is from Norway and kind of other parts. Ultimately, what this shows to me is we need to reduce dependency on third countries, because you just don't know which way to go. The US has always been a very close ally, a very reliable ally. But I don't think we can say that going forward any more necessarily. Even under Biden, he pulls the opening of new LNG terminals, which would have had an impact on exports to the EU and on energy prices, therefore, directly related. So I think we need to all of this undermine or sorry, underscores the need to accelerate the energy transition in a way that is just an equitable, very important. But obviously, there is going to be a bit of an intermediate gap until which that happened happens. And there, I mean, the Commission is looking to buy more American LNG. I'm not sure that's necessarily the right approach for the reasons that I've outlined for the US potentially becoming more unreliable in that regard. They're looking to Qatar, they're looking to Nigeria, they're looking to other partners, and essentially diversify that partnership base. But it just makes the energy transition all the more important. Yeah, Russ, I mean, your book looks optimistically towards our relationship with the US and listening to Alex and Ahmed talking less optimistically about what that might entail. I wonder what your thinking is. I mean, what about our relationships with China? Well, first of all, I don't think it was a binary choice. You have to be with America or you be with Europe. But when it comes undiplomatically, we should be with both, obviously. But when it comes to an economic model, I think we very much got to look to the US rather than the EU. It seems to me that the EU has this sort of heritage approach to industrial policy. If something exists, if a business exists, industry exists, it's got to be preserved, the jobs have got to be preserved, as they are, whereas America has a much more innovative approach. If something's new, it's quite happy to let it go. And so many times, the EU has squashed new technologies, some GM food was the prime example. 25 years ago, Europe and Britain particularly a very good place to take a lead in that industry. It was all but squashed through EU regulation. And, you know, the fears of Frankenstein foods and all this rubbish. But, you know, in the end, we ended up eating GM food anyway, because it's all in the soil. You know, there was no such thing as GM food soil on the GM freeze soil on the international market, it's all mixed together. So we eat them anyway. This is a good note to talk about about Christmas. We've been having a very serious conversation about the threats facing us. But outside this building, our Christmas shop is widely carrying on as normal. And one of the things we're talking about is a culture change. Is there an argument from informing the general public about the seriousness of the kinds of threats we face? And what would it mean to be put on a war footing as it were, Alex? So two things. One, there is an argument, which I hope I've already made. I hope we've already made that we need to be more realistic. But the good news is liberal democracy is the best way of running a country. And that's because it arranges for the peaceful transfer of power. That isn't present in China. That isn't present in Russia. It isn't present in all the places we worry about. We need more confidence in the intrinsic resilience of what we have, because it's there. And we should talk about it more. Do you have that confidence? Yes. Yeah. How can you be a spy and live in the overall third years without thinking we're different to the other lot? Well, that's very heartening to hear from a former head of the Intelligence Secret Service, Sir Alex Younger. Thank you to all of my guests. Sir Alex Young, a former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Armida Van Rai, senior research fellow in the Europe program at Chatham House, and the journalist Ross Clark, whose book far from EUtopia, How Europe is Failing and Britain Could Do Better, is published on the 23rd of January. Next week, Tom Sutcliffe on Acoustics, where music and architecture meet sounds lovely and much better than my sniffling cold. Apologies for that. But for me, for now, thank you and goodbye. Thank you for listening to this edition of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, produced by Katie Hickman and Natalia Fernandez. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space after the yoga classes I felt amazing. But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders. I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, being in a house and not feeling like they can leave. World of Secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. 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