alicia kearns, welcome to hardtalk. now, you are chair of the uk parliament s foreign affairs select committee. you have to take an overview of what is happening across foreign policy. would you agree that right now the bandwidth of foreign policy thinking is very much taken up by israel, by the war in gaza? absolutely. and this is one of the challenges that democracies have. we need to make sure that we can t say, well, we only have bandwidth to focus on one conflict, because unfortunately we don t have the liberty to say we have only one to focus on. but secondly, we re not doing enough to stop conflict popping up in other places. so until we are doing that, we don t get to say, well, we can only focus on israel and gaza for the next month, or, we can only focus on ukraine. we have to find a way to do both, and that means more multilateral working, more leaning on one another, more dividing and conquering in terms of our assets and what we re focusing on. and yet su
alicia kearns, welcome to hardtalk. now, you are chair of the uk parliament s foreign affairs select committee. you have to take an overview of what is happening across foreign policy. would you agree that right now the bandwidth of foreign policy thinking is very much taken up by israel, by the war in gaza? absolutely. and this is one of the challenges that democracies have. we need to make sure that we can t say, well, we only have bandwidth to focus on one conflict, because unfortunately we don t have the liberty to say we have only one to focus on. but secondly, we re not doing enough to stop conflict popping up in other places. so until we are doing that, we don t get to say, well, we can only focus on israel and gaza for the next month, or, we can only focus on ukraine. we have to find a way to do both, and that means more multilateral working, more leaning on one another, more dividing and conquering in terms of our assets and what we re focusing on. and yet su
alicia kearns, welcome to hardtalk. now, you are chair of the uk parliament s foreign affairs select committee. you have to take an overview of what is happening across foreign policy. would you agree that right now the bandwidth of foreign policy thinking is very much taken up by israel, by the war in gaza? absolutely. and this is one of the challenges that democracies have. we need to make sure that we can t say, well, we only have bandwidth to focus on one conflict, because unfortunately we don t have the liberty to say we have only one to focus on. but secondly, we re not doing enough to stop conflict popping up in other places. so until we are doing that, we don t get to say, well, we can only focus on israel and gaza for the next month, or, we can only focus on ukraine. we have to find a way to do both, and that means more multilateral working, more leaning on one another, more dividing and conquering in terms of our assets and what we re focusing on. and yet such
alicia kearns, welcome to hardtalk. now, you are chair of the uk parliament s foreign affairs select committee. you have to take an overview of what is happening across foreign policy. would you agree that right now the bandwidth of foreign policy thinking is very much taken up by israel, by the war in gaza? absolutely. and this is one of the challenges that democracies have. we need to make sure that we can t say, well, we only have bandwidth to focus on one conflict, because unfortunately we don t have the liberty to say we have only one to focus on. but secondly, we re not doing enough to stop conflict popping up in other places. so until we are doing that, we don t get to say, well, we can only focus on israel and gaza for the next month, or, we can only focus on ukraine. we have to find a way to do both, and that means more multilateral working, more leaning on one another, more dividing and conquering in terms of our assets and what we re focusing on. and yet such
long it takes to whatever it takes. so i m hoping to be in dc next week. i m hoping to travel with seven other chairs of foreign affairs committees from across europe. and we are going to make the case to our american counterparts that, yes, there of course are difficult conversations to be had domestically, but the amounts of gdp that the us is committing to support ukraine is nowhere near as much as countries like lithuania are using, countries like estonia. but do you seriously think american politicians, particularly in a presidential election year, are going to listen to people like you? oh, i hope they do, and in the past i ve been able to have very blunt conversations. in fact, the last time i went to dc i remember my american counterpart saying, guys, if the brits are saying this, we should be listening. and we saw only a few weeks later more agreements made to support ukraine. we do not have a choice. ukraine is fighting for all of ourfreedoms. let s not repeat the mistak