Former U.K. Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair described Iran as the “origin of the instability in the Middle East” in a wide-ranging interview with Newsweek.
Blair, whose decision to use British armed forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq—as well as his perceived closeness to President George W. Bush— attracted criticism at home and abroad, said that the key to stability in the region was to ensure religious tolerance prevailed over Islamism. He said part of this was ensuring Iran is never allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
He blamed Iran for attempting to export its revolution through proxies such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which have been heavily targeted by Israel since the attacks of October 7, 2023, the bloodiest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Blair, who is now Roman Catholic, became leader of the British Labour Party in 1994 and was prime minister from 1997 to 2007. After the Iraq War he was accused by critics of misleading the U.K. Parliament when no weapons of mass destruction were found. However, Sir John Chilcot, who led a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the war, later told a parliamentary committee: “I absolve him [Blair] from a personal and demonstrable decision to deceive parliament or the public—to state falsehoods, knowing them to be false.”
Blair’s time in office also included passing the Good Friday Agreement, a landmark in the Northern Ireland peace process, and humanitarian interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.
After leaving office, he was special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East—an organization to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process comprising the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia—until 2015. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush in 2009.
In 2016, he founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a nonprofit organization to fight what he described as the growth of authoritarian populism across the world. His latest book, On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century, is a manual for today’s leaders based on his experiences in politics.
Newsweek Global Editor in Chief Nancy Cooper, VP, Digital Publishing Christopher Roberts and Content Director Barney Henderson spoke with him in London. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Your book is in a very unusual format. One reviewer described it as like The Prince, but without the malice. Why did you decide to write it?
Because the thing about being a political leader is that everyone thinks it’s just about politics, but actually, when you get into government, you realize, you know, maybe winning government was about being the great communicator, but being in government you’ve got to be a great chief executive. And there’s a whole skillset that is attributable to the profession in the same way that you would have a skillset attributable to any profession. But we don’t look at politics like that. And so, you know, I learned lessons from governing on the job, as it were, and afterwards in the work we now do in roughly over 40 countries, worldwide, and I thought ‘it’s absurd’. There’s no guide for leaders when these are the things that I know that they will want to have answers to and the things that will be troubling them when they reach this position of extraordinary power. Because where else in life would you put someone in a job of enormous importance with actually zero qualifications. We would never do that in your job or running a company, or, you know, you wouldn’t if Manchester United decided to change their coach, you wouldn’t just go into the stands and say, give me the most enthusiastic fan to put in charge.
You’ve said that you would have stayed in power if you could have done, but also that you didn’t enjoy a lot of your time in power, and only sort of, perhaps, two or three moments really stand out. Don’t you prefer your life now?
I prefer my life now in the sense that it’s much less stressful, and recently, as the institute’s grown, yeah, I think I feel much more professionally fulfilled, and I think we can build this into a really, really big organization which will last. So I think now I’m in the right place, but it’s, you know, you’ve got to be honest with yourself, you don’t have the same power that you have when you’re actually in power. So yeah..
Would you go back if you could?
I never waste time thinking about that, because I don’t think it’s ever possible…. [I] really haven’t thought about it enough as an actual thing, because it’s not an actual thing. And my wife always says to me, ‘you might think of going back until you remember what it was actually like’.
You’ve recently said that peace in the Middle East is possible. Do you still believe that?
Yes… When I went back to Israel a couple of weeks ago, it was my 271st visit, I think we worked out, since leaving office to Israel. We have an office in Israel. We have offices in the Middle East. I go there very, very often. I’ve been in this thing for 25 years or more. I think you’ve got to look at it in two different ways: the immediate crises, Gaza, Lebanon, so on, Iran; and then you’ve got to look at it to take a step back and ask, “What’s the big picture in the Middle East?” Because what that big, big picture represents is the answer to the question of whether there’s hope in the Middle East or not.
And the big picture, in my view, is all to do with whether the countries in the Middle East can evolve their societies towards societies of religious tolerance, where belief in God is between you and God, and you don’t turn politics into a religion into a political ideology. And secondly, whether you have modern, connected economies in which your young people believe they’re part of the modern world economically, and those that require rule-based economies that are vibrant and where people of enterprise can form enterprises and do well and, you know, all over the Middle East that battle is going on. It’s a battle between… I always say to people; we’ve got to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. You know, Islam is the religion. Islamism is the turning of the religion into a political ideology which will necessarily be totalitarian, exclusivist and basically economically backward. So that’s the choice of the Middle East, and you can see these competing visions going on all the time.
Now, I personally believe that the human spirit will ultimately propel the Middle East towards modernization, but that’s the question, and is there anything the West can do to push that in the direction? You support the modernizers. That’s what we should be doing. And be very clear that about the influence of Iran, which is the representation of one part of that…. People think that because Iran is the Islamic Republic of Iran, but it’s here, and the Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni…. They’re never going to work together, but they will work together against the West.
You write in your book about the paralysis of the United Nations as a result of the growing alliance between China and Russia. What’s the future of the U.N. and how can it become influential again?
That’s a really good question. I mean, I opposed trying to isolate China or disengage from China because I think China’s got every right to be a big global power and to exercise influence economically and politically on the world stage. The problem is it has—I don’t quite understand why—decided to be in this alliance with Russia, with Iran, North Korea. It’s a club that shouldn’t have a long waiting list. But you’ve got to say it, it is a thing today. And what that means is that United Nations… you’ve got two permanent members that are going to be pretty much in opposition to the other three.
Now, I think in the end, the reason why you can’t and shouldn’t isolate China is because they have the right to exercise influence, and because there are issues—climate change, global health stability, the economy, actually controlling some of the behavior of the other members of the club—in which we need China. But it’s hard to see how the United Nations functions in that with that political confrontation. You’ve also got to keep an open mind about China, because China, since the People’s Republic of China was created, they’ve gone through many iterations. It’s not been one straight line from 1949 to today. On the contrary,they’ve gone through periods of, you know, where the Communist party wanted to control everything. You went through the Cultural Revolution. They went through opening up.
They’re now in a situation where I, if I was a Chinese leader, I’d still find it a little uncertain what our strategy was for the future, because, in the end, China’s a strong civilization; very, very talented people. Does it really profit them to be, you know, isolated from the West? I can’t see it myself. And therefore, I think what’s important from the western perspective is to keep lines of communication open and also to try and see the world through Chinese eyes. Because I think there’s always a risk with the West that we see everything through Western eyes.
You just mentioned Russia. I’m curious to know how you found dealing with Vladimir Putin personally. How should the West approach that issue now?
Well, with Putin, I would say…I don’t know whether he was always like he is now—and we didn’t spot it—or he changed. I mean, I tend to think that he changed. The Putin that I first met was very open, very much wanting to create ties with the West. We used to meet in St. Petersburg, which is the Western-facing part of Russia. And you know, the conversation then was all about Russia’s place in the world as a modernizing force. And…people even used to talk at one point about, is it possible for Russia to join the European Union?
We used to invite Russia to NATO meetings. The G7 was the G8. It was still the G8 by the time I left office, by the way. So the idea that the West kind of…pushed Russia away or tried to isolate them, it’s just not true. On the contrary, we were always thinking of ways that we could bind Russia to us—but in the end, he opted against the modernization of his economy and in favor of nationalism, which is what people default to when they find economic change too hard. And, you know, the recreation of the Russian Empire, which is not, it’s not possible to do. And you know, I will say to people here, Ukraine could have decided to go with Russia. So if I was Putin, I’d be asking why did they decide not to.
And that’s economic, in your view?
And political. Why do they want to be part of Europe? Because people want to be part of that prosperity in Europe, despite all the problems. We look at Poland today, but look at Poland and Ukraine at the end of the Cold War, 1992 I think at that time, they would have been roughly equal, and GDP, they had roughly when you look at it today, but it’s now a successful modern country, right? Because they’re part of the European Union. And okay, the politics may be difficult, and they have all sorts of political crises from time to time. But, you know, the people are free… You’ve got a whole new young generation in Ukraine that are, you know, they want to be connected to the world, and therefore, yes, it’s economic, but it’s also political, and that’s why the idea that you could ever stop them doing that by force and remove a democratically elected president… And you know, the people would then say, ‘Okay, well, we’re happy to be back in the Russian Empire under the Putin system of government’. I mean, I don’t know how anyone could ever have thought that they would accept that.
Can Ukraine win?
Well, it depends on what winning means. The most important thing is that the conflict ends in a way that doesn’t reward Russian aggression. The important thing is for the West to give Ukraine every support in order to bring about an agreement. I mean, it won’t end like the First World War or the Second World War, right? And once you understand that, there’s going to be some form of agreement, but it’s important Ukraine’s in a strong negotiating position and that’s why we have to support them.
In the presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris said the U.S. wants Ukraine to win. And former President Trump did not say that. Is he wrong?
I think it depends what happens…. I can’t believe that any American president would want Russia to come out of this feeling it had gained a victory. Because, by the way, that would have big implications for how China feels about American power. So, let’s see. I mean, I don’t know. And if you’re about to ask me a slew of questions about who I want to win, and what I think about the American election, save the trouble because I really don’t want to get into it. Who knows?
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