Andrew Neil On Global Politics And The US

Andrew Neil has long been one of the finest journalists in the UK. He has been chairman of The Spectator, chairman of Sky TV, editor of The Sunday Times, and a BBC anchor, where his grueling interviews of politicians became legendary. He’s currently a columnist for both the UK and US versions of The Daily Mail and an anchor for Times Radio. In the US he went viral after a car-crash interview with Ben Shapiro.

For two clips of our convo — on Europe’s steady decline, and Trump’s cluelessness on tariffs — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up near Glasgow as a working-class Tory; his mother working in the mills; his father fighting the Nazis; his merit-based grammar school (before Labour dissolved them); thriving on the debate team; studying US history at university; Adam Smith; reporting on The Troubles; covering the White House at The Economist in the early '80s; Reagan Dems and Trump Hispanics; covering labor and industry in the Thatcher era; her crackdown on unions; the print unions that spurred violence; Alastair Stewart; tough interviewing and how the US media falls short; Tim Russert; audio of Neil grilling Shapiro and Boris; the policy-lite race between Trump and Harris; populism in the US and UK; Greenland and the Panama Canal; the rise of autocracy in the 21st Century; recent elections in Europe; Starmer; US isolationism past and present; the Iraq War; the 2008 crash; Taiwan and semiconductors; China’s weakening economy; the overconfidence of the US after the Cold War; Brexit; Covid; mass migration; AI; and the challenge of Muslim assimilation in Europe.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: John Gray on the state of liberal democracy, Jon Rauch on “Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s episode with Adam Kirsch on “settler colonialism”:

I enjoyed your discussion with Kirsch, and I’m glad you made the point that all countries have been built on colonialism if you go back far enough. The history of humanity is one of movements of peoples, conquest, displacement, massacres, and absorption. (Noah Smith had a good take on this recently: “No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land.”)

When discussing the expulsion of 800,000 Arabs during the founding of Israel, neither you nor Kirsch mentioned that a similar number of Jews were subsequently expelled from Arab countries. (Other than by Bill Maher in one his shows after October 7, I hardly see this discussed by anyone.)

In other words, it was an exchange of populations — something that happened at roughly the same time, and on a much larger scale, during the partition of India, when millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled from what became Pakistan and millions of Muslims fled in the reverse direction. Yet within a few years, there were no refugee camps, since India and Pakistan — both poor countries — absorbed and settled these refugees. Around the same time, there were also large population exchanges in northern Europe, and a couple of decades earlier, between Turkey and Greece. All of these refugees were absorbed and settled.

What is noteworthy about the Palestinian Arabs is that they were not absorbed by the Arab countries, though they could easily have been. It has suited the Arab countries to keep them as refugees, as a distraction from their own failures.

Another asks rhetorically, “Are the current immigrants to the US also settler colonialists?” Another:

The next time you come across some leftist who believes the very existence of America is bankrupt from birth, ask them, “If, two thousand years from now, an indigenous tribe had the opportunity to reestablish sovereignty on its ancestral homeland in Utah or Minnesota or New York, would it be justified in doing so?” If they say, “Yes absolutely,” ask them how that fundamentally differs from Zionism — and behold their ignorance of history. If they say, “No, it will have been too long,” ask them where the statute of limitations is (the answer can only be arbitrary). But as I know you don’t need me to tell you, 99% of the time the answer will be the former. Sheer hypocrisy.

To be sure, none of this invalidates the extreme complexity of recent history and the present situation, which includes a great deal of which Zionists should not be proud. But as Kirsch notes and as you know, the leftist critique of Israel isn’t really about October 7 or Camp David 2000 or even 1967; it’s about 1948, and indeed 1878.

At its root, though, Zionism — not merely as an expedient to escape an increasingly genocidal Europe, but as, in the words of Hatikvah, the realization of a 2,000-year-old hope — is perhaps the most deeply decolonial political movement in history. This is what the left doesn’t understand (often due to bad faith, of course). And it’s what Sinwar didn’t understand. When the Palestinians broadly come to understand it, then — and perhaps only then, I’m afraid — will true and lasting peace finally be at hand.

Another listener also invokes parallels to Native Americans:

Thank you for the episode with Adam Kirsch, and I’m going to buy his book. I work adjacent to the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and I would be shunned for questioning the concept of settler colonialism. For at least the past 20 years, it’s become one of the orthodoxies you wrote about in your column last week.

At the 30,000-foot level, your initial take is exactly right: if every part of European invasion/settlement in North America, Australia, Rhodesia, etc. is the same, then: A) there’s no point in writing or reading history, because it’s all one “structure”; and B) there were empires approximating “settler colonial” entities in the Americas before 1492 and in Africa, etc.

The Israel/Palestine parallels and differences are unsettling (pun intended). Indigenous people in North America and Australia were overwhelmed by unfathomable levels of death from disease, which could wipe out 80% of a people a thousand miles from any physical European presence, as cholera or smallpox spread. Then when settlers did arrive (some of them refugees, prisoners, or slaves, let’s remember), there was no UN to criticize genocidal violence. Ultimately, settlers outnumbered Natives by overwhelming numbers. Israel doesn’t have any of those (horrific) “luxuries”, so it isn’t going to be as easy for them.

And I appreciated you pushing back on Kirsch’s premise that every ethnic group deserves an ethno-state. Should the UN create Israels for Kurds or Roma, or colonize Atlanta to return Georgia to the Cherokee Nation’s 300,000-strong diaspora to make up for the Trail of Tears?

P.S. You should do an episode about American Indians! Talk to novelist Sherman Alexie about his post-cancellation life and this great Substack essay from a couple of years ago criticizing broad-brush interpretations and lefty pieties about Indians.

Just a note to say that my role here was to push back, and so I raised points I don’t necessarily agree with in order to get Adam to unpack his argument some more.

Here’s a clip of us addressing the canard of “genocide” when it comes to Gaza and elsewhere:

A dissent over the episode:

Listening to your discussion with Kirsch, I think you’re being a real wimp on the settler-colonialism thing. Your liberalism and Christianity compel you to recognize the profound immoralities intrinsic to the settler-colonial project, but you think the immorality was often (e.g. in the case of America) justified anyway because they (e.g. the English colonists/Americans) were by far the superior civilization. Just admit that is your view and stop cavilling!

By the way, Kirsch’s argument that the European Jews who founded Israel are indigenous to Palestine is fantastically weak, and I wish you’d have challenged him on that (though your challenges were quite effective overall). Okay, the European Jews have a considerable amount of ancient Levantine DNA, and also have a religious connection to the land. I accept this because it’s true. But it doesn’t change the fact that in looks, culture, ideology, and language they “came as Europeans” (to quote David Ben-Gurion). Those things matter far more in practical terms than secularized Jewish myths about Eretz Israel and 23andMe results. I would think you’d appreciate that, as a conservative.

Any people in the Palestinians’ position would’ve seen the Zionists as colonizers, given that they “came as Europeans” and sought to transform Palestine into a Jewish state. Indeed, the Zionists — from Herzl (who called Zionism “something colonial” in a 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes) to Jabotinsky (who repeatedly referred to Zionism as colonialism and compared the Palestinian Arabs to the Aztec and Sioux) to Ben-Gurion — saw themselves as Europeans and colonizers!

Points taken. I made some of them myself. But I would not say the violence, genocide, and slavery that made America possible are defensible because the colonialists had a “superior civilization.” Even if the colonialists were superior in some ways, that did not give them the right to invade and occupy. I guess I think that global migration was inevitable once technology reached a certain point, and so some kind of colonialism was always going to emerge. The first experiments, as my listener notes above, generated so many plagues that seizing the land without interminable struggle became feasible. None of this applies to the 20th Century creation of Israel though.

Another dissent:

I’ve been a subscriber since the early *Daily* Dish days, and this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to write to you. Your conversation with Kirsch left my jaw on the floor. First off, you suggest that settler colonialism (or the broader, longer trend of exploring and conquering huge swaths of the planet) is uniquely European. You seem to have forgotten that Arab peoples — who are indigenous to the Arabian peninsula — conquered (read: settler-colonized) most of the Middle East, North Africa, and part of Southern Europe. How do you think Arabic became one of the most commonly spoken languages on the planet?

Unlike Christians and Arabs, Jewish people have never gone to war for any piece of land other than the one sliver of land the size of New Jersey that was once ours. (We also don’t seek to convert others to our faith.) You pay lip service to the damage done by European colonialism, mostly writing it off as “something humans have essentially been doing forever.” But when it comes to Israel, it’s “egregious.” Do you not see this double standard?

You seem to think that the only reason why so many around the world hate Israel is that its creation is so recent. Did it not ever occur to you that many people just can’t stand the idea of a Jewish state? Considering the absurd double standard you use to characterize European colonization vs the creation of Israel, and your total ignorance of Arab colonization, it seems to me that you too — on a level you won't acknowledge but should explore — have it in for the Jews.

Sigh. Yes, my reader is dead on about the ubiquity of colonialism — a point I made early in the conversation. But it does matter that Israel was created very late in the day — just as colonialism was being dismantled, not erected — and that the very modern context meant that Israel couldn’t get away with many of the things earlier colonialists had. Unfair maybe. But true nonetheless. Colonialism in the 1840s was more defensible in world opinion than colonialism in the 1940s.

As for my “having it in for the Jews,” my listener may have missed other things I said in the episode, including:

The Jewish people have constructed a state and a country that is simply extraordinary — that is booming with talent, freedom, culture, science, technology. It’s kicking ass! …

I am more sympathetic to Israel now than I was two years ago … because I can see the absolute impossibility of their situation. And since I don’t think that Israel should be destroyed — at this point, I think it would be an absolute moral crime to somehow, in any way, enable the end to the state of Israel.

A less sunny view of Israel comes from this listener:

I grew up in the “old Israel,” and there’s much more to say about the evolution of the nation. It’s becoming an ethno-nationalist state, and it’s no longer that incredibly advanced cultural, scientific, and democratic phenomenon. It’s now considered an illiberal democracy, where censorship and religion creep into daily life. It also has the second highest poverty rate in the OECD. In the last year alone, around 83,000 have left with no plans to return. Of my friends, anyone with a second passport is contemplating leaving, and those who can afford to are doing so.

One more on the episode writes, “Thank you for asking Adam Kirsch challenging questions, which gave us an opportunity to hear his calm and measured responses”:

A failure in modern discourse on Israel is to portray the Palestinians as a besieged minority denied self-determination. Palestinians, however, are Arab Muslims and therefore part of the regional cultural hegemony. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, ethnic and religious minorities have been poorly treated in the Middle East. Just ask the Yazidis, the Kurds, the Armenians, the Lebanese Maronites, the Egyptian Coptic Christians, and yes, the Jews. On the eve of WWII, Baghdad was a quarter Jewish, and they endured a horrific pogrom in 1941.

As nation-states were being created out of the former Ottoman Empire, the refusal by the majority culture to accept the self-determination of a small minority on a tiny piece of land was not inevitable. It is an ongoing tragedy. As Kirsch said, still today most Palestinians claim they would rather have no state than accept a Jewish state. Is there a better example of cutting off your nose to spite your face? Imagine the prosperity that Palestinians, and the wider region, would be enjoying if they’d chosen peaceful co-existence with Israel.

For example, look to Singapore and Malaysia. Not long before Zionists began migrating to Israel, a surge of Chinese immigrants arrived on the Malay peninsula, then a Muslim-majority society and a British colony. Shortly after gaining independence in 1957, Malaysia introduced a race-based quota system to limit the number of ethnic Chinese in universities, government, and the public sector. This led to the separation of Singapore from Malaysia. Singapore declared itself a sovereign nation in 1965. Today, Singapore (a tiny country) has an ethnic Chinese majority and a Malay Muslim minority. The demographics of Malaysia (a sizable country) are the reverse, though the ratios are different. Just to the south is Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. As Singapore has prospered, Malaysia and the region have benefitted by being peaceful neighbors.

Thus, by fixating on European immigration, proponents of settler colonialism miss valuable lessons from other parts of the world about demographic change, nation-state creation, and the dynamics between minority and majority cultures.

On another topic entirely, here’s a guest recommendation for a future pod:

There hasn’t really been any serious discussion of whether the US will elect a female president (if there is a decent candidate selected, rather than terrible ones like Clinton and Harris). You have touched on this without exploring it in depth, and it’s an interesting topic.

You and I both come from countries that have had three female Prime Ministers, and arguably in each country one was great, one was mediocre, and one turned out to be terrible. Their gender hasn’t seemed to have been an issue for the voters. Of the living female former PMs, Helen Clark has a formidable intellect and dominated her party and New Zealand politics, winning three elections in a row, so perhaps you could get her on to discuss this issue.

Here’s a topic rec:

After reading the bestseller Say Nothing, I got to thinking: Have you ever thought of doing a Dishcast on the history of the IRA? I ask because I think you’re unusual in being an Irish Catholic and also an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, so you can see the conflict from both sides.

I haven’t read the book, but I recently watched the miniseries. It’s an extraordinary piece of work — penetrating, real, honest, heart-breaking, funny. It’s the best thing on TV since Shogun, and the best miniseries since The Bureau. And yes, I’m a Unionist and a Catholic, whose grandmother witnessed the terror of the brutal British Black and Tan militias. One of my aunts was a Northern Irish Catholic — her accent a marvel to me as a young boy. But my grandmother married a British soldier (who never served in Ireland, mind you), was ferociously attached to her new country, and had no illusions about the IRA.

I don’t feel strongly about a political solution either way. But I do feel strongly about terrorism and the thuggery of the IRA; and the bigoted violence of the Protestant cops as well. Say Nothing slices through the IRA mafia boss, Gerry Adams, like a stiletto, and spares no detail with respect to Protestant hate.

Here’s a trailer for the miniseries:

Continued from the main page, here’s another dissent over last week’s column:

I want to thank you for exposing the lenient treatment of of the British-Pakistani men who raped and tortured so many English women, as well as your further examination of your mistaken support of the Iraq War. But linking Iraq and those heinous rapes to the transgender disputes shows that you are still unable to analyze the transgender issue free of your own orthodoxy.