Tony Blair: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let’s go back a little bit to your time in office. There was a unique unipolar moment that happens very rarely in history. The Anglosphere had much more power in the 1990s and early 2000s than the rest of the world. In what way did that feel different from today's world? Is there something you would now change about the way the institutions were set up at the time and carried forward? There was a key opportunity in the unipolar moment. How should that have been used? How well was it used? It's difficult. We did try a lot, contrary to what's sometimes written, for example with Russia. I dealt with President Putin a lot when I was prime minister. It was myself and President Clinton who took the crucial decision to bring China into the world's trading framework. The G7 at the time was the G8 with Russia there and China would always be invited. I honestly think we tried a lot to recognize that we were going to live in a new world. The power wasn’t going to shift from the West in the sense the West would become not powerful. The East was going to become also powerful. We did understand that and work towards that. Particularly in these last few years, China and Russia have come to a position that is seemingly hostile to Western democracy in terms of fundamental values and systems. That's a difficult problem. What we probably underestimated was how fast India would rise. At the time it seemed India was still going to be quite constrained. We live in a multipolar world today. Personally, I think that's a good thing. In any event, it's an inevitable thing. It's really important always to give this message to China, for example. China as of right is one of the big powers in the world and as of right should have a huge influence. I don't believe in trying to constrain or contain China. We do have to accept that the Chinese system is presently run on different lines to our own and is overtly hostile to some degree. This is why it's important for us to retain military and technological superiority, even though I believe passionately that it's important that we leave space for cooperation and engagement with China. Now how much could we have foreseen all of this back in those days? I'm not sure. Sometimes one of the problems of the West is that we always see it through our own lens. We always think that we could have done something different to change the world. But actually the rest of the world operates on its own principles as well. Sometimes the change happens, not because we didn't do something, but because the rest of the world did. Final question. You interact with leaders today across dozens, maybe hundreds, of countries. Which among them is best playing the deck they've been dealt? Who is the most impressive leader? It doesn't have to be a huge country or anything. Given the deck they've been dealt, who's best?…

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