Was diplomacy given a chance? Iran and US point to failures, as fighting resumes

Sally Hayden

You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first

John Everard

broadcast on 13 July 2026 on Monaco

Andrew Muller

Radio, US President Donald Trump declares the Strait of Hormuz both open and blockaded. Is authoritarian overreach a good way to roll back authoritarian overreach? And does anybody want anybody else's children at work? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily. Start.

John Everard

Foreign.

Andrew Muller

Welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Negar Anger and John Everard will discuss today's big stories. And we'll hear from the foreign correspondent Sally Hayden, author of this Is Also a Love Story, Searching for Good in a Divided World. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily.

John Everard

Foreign.

Andrew Muller

This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Nagar Anger, former advisor to the U.S. state Department and National Security Council, and by John Everard, former British ambassador to Belarus, Uruguay and North Korea. Hello to you both.

John Everard

Hello there.

Negar Anger

Good afternoon.

Andrew Muller

Nagar, first of all, you have, aside from everything else, you are doing a photography exhibition coming?

Negar Anger

I am. This is very exciting. I'm in the depths of putting together the scenographic sort of route of this photography exhibition. It's about Sufi life in Germany and specifically in Frankfurt. It's going to take place in the Frankfurt City hall and the opening day is October 16th.

Andrew Muller

How big a thing is Sufism in Frankfurt?

Negar Anger

It's quite limited, hence the niche exhibition I'm putting together. But the statistics on Sufis in Germany writ large is quite limited since so much of the statistics and polling is focused on whether you're Sufi or Shia. And Sufis see themselves, you know, across all Islamic sort of perspectives. They're considered kind of the peaceful sort of entity of Islam. So they have a lot of practices very known for the whirling dervishes in Turkey. So many of them do have that practice. So a lot of the photographs in video montages I have really focus on kind of those practices as well as kind of the seen and the unseen. Right. Many of them are doctors, politicians. So it'll be an interesting exhibition. In my opinion.

Andrew Muller

It will. We will talk more about it as opening night draws nearer. John, you have recently been on. Well, regular listeners will be aware that you do this fairly regularly. You disappear on these vast, epic bicycle rides. But even by your standards, this is, this is quite a hike.

John Everard

It was quite a hike. I rode from Vienna, down the Danube,

Andrew Muller

through

John Everard

Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, back into Romania to Constanza on the Black Sea. I wanted to do this not just because it's all continued from where I left off. I cycled to Vienna a couple of years ago, so the finish point became the starting point, but also to see countries that I hadn't actually seen since Yugoslavia broke up. As you know, I was involved in the breakup of Yugoslavia. I mean, not that I. I was part of a diplomatic effort around it.

Andrew Muller

We name the guilty man.

John Everard

That's right, yes. Finally run me to earth. But also because I'd never actually been through Romania before. That was quite an eye opener. I mean, you have this strange experience when you cross from Serbia into Romania. You realize you suddenly you come into the third World, that lots of people driving horse carts around, people still drawing water from village wells and people in very small light and the villagers were fascina, this person on a bicycle sort of suddenly riding through their world. And at one point, I remember I sat on a bench and a little girl, 9, 10 maybe Eagles, riding a bicycle onto her village, just came and sat and stared at me, intrigued by this large, hairy, blue eyed creature who suddenly descended on her. She was actually very polite and tried hard to chat her, although my Romanian wasn't really up to it. But you realize just how different life is out there.

Andrew Muller

And you are now being worshipped, presumably somewhere as some strange two wheeled God.

John Everard

I very much hope not.

Andrew Muller

Well, we will start in Iran, where US President Donald Trump appears to have reached the stage of attempting to manifest his desires via incantation on social media. Within the last few hours, he has declared, not for the first time, that the Strait of Hormuz is open and will remain open, though it isn't and it probably won't. He has further announced that the US will henceforth be known as the Guardian of the Hormuz Strait, which he wrote in all caps. That is the print equivalent of the common Anglo American assumption that if you shout at foreigners in English long enough and loudly enough, they will get the message. Eventually. There will be, apparently, at least until Trump gets bored with or forgets about the idea, a 20% charge on all cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuzenega. How is this going to work? Obviously, I know the answer is it isn't, but go ahead.

Negar Anger

Wow. It's a very good question. I think many are scratching their heads. The markets are definitely scratching their heads trying to figure out a solution to this. Look, you know, diplomacy isn't dead here. It's on its last legs. But, you know, this is sort of very much sort of kind of armed bargaining that President Trump has entered into. And the Iranians are known for, you know, being kind of these bizarre negotiators. They're going to negotiate to the very last degree. And, you know, the. They know that the Strait of Hormuz is the stick that they can continue holding against the United States and the fact that it has the global ramifications. And so I think the part that's concerning. And so, you know, to answer your question, why I think the economy is going to constantly be impacted by these various sort of messages being put out by the United States or even by the Iranians, is that the US Is looking at this as sort of the end of the game. Right. The Iranians see this as the beginning. It's the opening credits of the situation. So they are holding onto this scenario for quite some time. I honestly would probably put a lot more energy and effort to try to see what the mediators are doing, how they're able to bring the parties to the table, how are they going to provide those incentives to both parties to find that solution. And I think that's where we'll find that glimmer of hope. The markets, at least, will find that glimmer of hope.

Andrew Muller

John, what do you think? Is diplomacy actually dead here? By which I guess I'm asking if. And funnier things have happened. Your phone was to ring in the next couple of hours, and it was the President of the United States saying, john, get in there and fix this. Where would you start?

John Everard

I probably wouldn't. I mean, diplomacy. For a deal to be worth more than the paper it's written on, both sides have to believe that it's going to be implemented. You need some measure of trust in the other side. And it is painfully obvious there is no trust whatever between the United States and Iran. They both believe that the other has cheated, has destroyed the deal. There'd be simply no point in putting diplomats together in a room now. Anything you agreed would vanish into the ether the next day.

Andrew Muller

Well, just to follow that up, John, does that now mean that President Trump, assuming he doesn't wish to call you, has a choice between doing what we've now been doing since February and just continuing this peculiar forever war, or just realizing, okay, well, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz now?

John Everard

Yes, it means precisely that. Although when he came to office, President Trump inveighed against the horrors of the forever wars into which the United States had become enmeshed in so many places. He's gone and started another one. You're Quite right. The Iranians see this as the beginning, not the end. This is going to track on and on. The Iranians have already established two huge advantages. Firstly, they've established the principle that whoever charges the Straits of Homewards are no longer tariff free. What you're discussing now is who levies

Andrew Muller

those tariffs, or maybe because they are, lest we forget, supposed to be international waters.

John Everard

They are supposed to be international waters. Ho, ho. Who's going to drive a tanker through this lot? That's the first thing. The second thing is that Iran has established that it has complete escalation, dominance. That is to say that the United States has pretty much run out of cards. Every time Iran does something of which Donald Trump disapproves, which it often does, Donald Trump tries to bomb them, he's running out of targets. Iran, on the other hand, hey, the world's its oyster. It can escalate within the region. It's already struck targets well outside in the Gulf. It's within Iran's power if it wanted to, to take the war to the United States mainland, I mean, they've got enough cells there, they could do it. Iran right now holds most of these cards.

Andrew Muller

Negar on that thought, because this is a. It strikes me that a dog which has not entirely barked yet are the Gulf countries, the Gulf emirates whose patience with this lark, I suspect has long since expired, and several of whom were struck by Iran again over the weekend. What is Iran trying to do there? Is it actually trying to goad them into committing their own forces into a full scale regional war?

Negar Anger

You know, I think Iran right now, you know, they've been at this game for 47 years. They know how to essentially play the game with their neighbors. And what they're trying to do is essentially, and I think they've done actually a pretty decent job is to, you know, as was being mentioned earlier, they're showing their dominance in the region. The region now is a bit more cautious in terms of how they engage with the Iranians. They see how far the Iranians can go. They see the fact that they have nothing to lose. They essentially went to war with the superpower, they went to war with the United States and have survived. And so what they're trying to do is essentially telling the Gulf countries in the region to essentially one, choose a side, but two, also presenting to them the issues that lie with joining forces with the United States. They are changing the calculus in the region. And the Gulfies right now, these Gulf governments are quite concerned. They're concerned what will happen with their own citizens in their own domestic politics once this war subsides. So they essentially are stoking the fear for not only the governments but also the citizens of these various nations.

Andrew Muller

John, just finally and quickly on this one, one other subplot being reported in the last few hours is that former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said to be under house arrest over allegations that he has been in contact with Mossad, that money changed hands, and the Israelis may even have been teeing him up as the next president.

John Everard

Yes, I know no more than what you've just told our listeners, but how

Andrew Muller

likely or unlikely does that sound that

John Everard

Mossad would try to tee up an alternative regime to the current one? This is entirely possible. Mossad had done this in other places before. If they have, Mossad very rarely have only one card on the deck. If Ahmed is under house arrest and is therefore out of the game, I suspect they've got other plans. There are plenty of irradiance for sale right now.

Andrew Muller

Well, to Japan now, which since the end of World War II, has been obliged by its constitution to be something of a special case when it comes to both protecting and projecting itself. This is the reason that Japan's actually pretty formidable military has been obliged to brand itself the Self Defence Forces. And at least part of the reason why Japan has never had a Central Intelligence Agency, as the idea would be understood by the citizens of most other countries. That appears to be about to change. It is being reported that Japan's newish Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has asked Japanese officials to sound out such institutions as the United States CIA, Germany's bnd, and Australia's ASUS for guidance on how Japan can establish something of the sort Nego. First of all, is it surprising when you think about it that this hasn't been done before, that an obviously modern country like Japan, with interests all over the region and indeed all over the world, has just sort of left the intelligence gathering to, well, its police and its Ministry of Defence and its Ministry of Foreign affairs that doesn't have an organization of this sort.

Negar Anger

You know, I think, you know, we have to go back and look at history. I mean, the United States set up the Office of the Director of National intelligence right after 9, 11. That's when they realized that intelligence was being stovepipe and the president in senior leadership in the US Government weren't receiving a more comprehensive set of intelligence information. And obviously Japan right now is in that circumstance where they've just seen sort of where their blind spots have been in their intelligence space. So, again, this is recent history for such a large country like the United States, that I'm not quite surprised that for the Japanese government, this sort of, you know, kind of comprehensive gathering of intelligence hasn't been done until today. And, you know, the reality is, you know, I'm impressed with the Prime Minister wanting to make sure that they have the information at their fingertips in order to make informed decisions. Because, you know, quite frankly, the best intelligence is the type of information that you can see what those blind spots are and how you can make those decisions. You know, in government, at least when I was in government, that was the best intelligence. You know, you had a policy in mind, and you had sort of a structure in mind, and it was the intelligence that came in and gave you the alternative scenarios about why the decisions you were making. And I think the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister's office is now setting that up for her to make more informed decisions.

Andrew Muller

John, Japan has had an intelligence relationship with other countries for a long time. ASUS in Australia has been training Japanese intelligence operators for decades, for one. But is this likely to be one of those things that goes both ways? Will countries like the United States, Germany, and Australia actually be really happy that Japan is doing this and that a Japanese intelligence service would be a valuable boon to them as well?

John Everard

Yes, absolutely. I think there's been a certain amount of frustration with the limitations of Japanese intelligence and counterintelligence operations, and these moves will be widely welcomed in Western capitals. I mean, Japan has been hampered for a long time on this by the memory of the Toko, the ruthless intelligence operation under the military government. And it's taken a while, I think, for Japan to face out his past, put it behind it, and move on. In terms of what Takechi is trying to do, this is simply good intelligence management. The only intelligence that matters is the kind that you can present to a decision maker that actually informs a decision that affects actions. The rest is just background noise. And all intelligence agencies have got masses of intelligence, much more than they can actually comfortably handle. It's all a question of somebody at a center taking a synoptic view of what's going on, working out what matters and what doesn't matter and what you can put in front of decision makers who all have only 24 hours in the day, can't read everything, can make the right selection and guide the politics that way.

Andrew Muller

I mean, all that being said, is it weird that the United States appears so intent on gutting its own intelligence services? I mean, the new Director of National Intelligence Bill Paultes seems to be keen on continuing where Tulsi Gabbard left off. There's also been persistent talk, certainly throughout Trump's second term, of drastically reducing the CIA and the nsa.

Negar Anger

I mean, the irony of all of this conversation, it's the third round of staff reductions by the Trump administration of the intelligence community. I think this is essentially the worst outcome that you could plan for is when you essentially take these intelligence agencies and politicize them and they essentially become a performative action. And so this gutting of the intelligence agencies, we may not see the repercussions of it right now, but we'll definitely see the repercussions of it in 5 years, 10 years time when we don't have the right analysis analyzing the information that's needed. And again, this isthey're not doing an analysis at a 30,000 foot level. That's what policymakers do. They are going into the weeds. They're understanding, you know, whether it's a country, whether it's a topic, whether it's a theme. They're looking at essentially not only the historical perspective, but they're looking at themes. They're looking at potential markers in order for policymakers to then make the decision. But if you start, start, you know, plucking people out of the system, you don't have enough people to do that kind of research that they're doing right now. And we will have these essentially, you know, policymakers making blindsided decisions at that sort of 24 hour mark. Because as was rightly pointed out, when something happens in the world, you have, you know, when you're sitting at the White House, National Security Council or you're the equivalent, you are essentially having, you know, again, hours to make a decision. And you need that kind of information at your fingertips. You need that analyst or a corps of analysts who have researched a situation to come and give you that information. So this is at least, personally, I feel like this is such a bad outcome to have politicized the intelligence agencies.

Andrew Muller

Well, to Hungary now, which may shortly have a new president to go with its new prime minister. Since Peter Magyar led his Tao Party to a landslide victory in Hungary's parliamentary elections in April, he has called repeatedly for the resignation of President Tamar Suljuk, who has served since 2024 on the ticket of Fidez, the party of former Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Though the presidency of Hungary is a largely ceremonial role, the occupant of the office does theoretically possess a certain amount of power to thwart the government by Sending legislation round in circles somewhat. Magyar, clearly wishing to make the most of his huge parliamentary majority, is seeking to alter the constitution to ease Suljuk to the exit and indeed has, in the hour or so since I wrote that, done exactly that. The vote has gone through by 139 votes in favour to six against, with no abstentions. Although Fidesz boycotted the debate and the vote, so it would appear. John Taxi for President Suljuk. But is this somewhat arguably overreachy on the new Prime Minister's part? Because Sulyuk, though he was not elected as such, he is, you know, constitutionally correctly enshrined in that office. He has a term to complete, should he have been allowed to complete it.

John Everard

Matiah has acted entirely within the constitution. He has a two thirds majority in the.

Andrew Muller

Which does allow him to rewrite the

John Everard

constitution, which allows him to write the constitution, which is precisely what he's done. So he hasn't actually broken any rules. And if the party in power with that kind of majority decides he wants to change the constitution to evict a president, then it can do so, and it appears to be doing exactly that. I think it's a race in certainty. The Fidesh will cry foul. As you say, they boycotted the vote. I haven't yet seen a Fitesh statement on the vote though one must be imminent and we can expect protests and we can expect Orban to wave this in Magia's face. Say you accuse me of autocratic government, now look at what you're doing. But in fact the big difference is that no, Magiat is actually playing within the rules. He's got this mandate and he's to

Andrew Muller

used Peter Magyar's argument. Neger has been that they have a. Well, they need to move urgently to undo more than a decade of fairly relentless state capture by the Orban regime. And he also argues that he does have public opinion behind him. Polling keeps suggesting that nearly 70% of Hungarians want Sulyok gone again. Is that a makeable argument on his part?

John Everard

Part?

Negar Anger

Look, I think we want to make sure that when we go through this democratic renewal process, we're not just mimicking any sort of illiberal methods. It sort of sets a precedent. It sets a precedent not just in Hungary, but it's going to set a precedent in other countries. So we want to make sure that everything is done in the most sort of essentially democratic way. And something that's a democratic way doesn't necessarily mean majority either. So we need to make sure that again, obviously all those procedures, all the checks and balances are in place. I think, you know, it's very easy to make the argument that you may lose this ability of checks and balances with the removal of the president, which is from a different party, et cetera, et cetera. So again, I think there's, you know, this when you talk about democracy and these rules and these decisions, it's so gray and it's so fungible, depending on which side of the coin, you can be an autocratic regime and still have some of the same arguments to make. So I think we have to be very careful about this process. And again, yes, of course, all the rules are being applied. How is that engagement happening with Orban's party, with the citizens who actually do believe that the party should have stayed in power, that the president. President should have stayed in power. So we just have to be very careful. I think that's where my sort of bit of caution isespecially because it sets a precedent for other countries on the

Andrew Muller

subject of the checks and balances. John, as I understand it, and no Hungarian constitutional scholar, I. But one of the fun parts about what happens next is of course that President Suljuk has to sign this. He has. Well, Peter Magyar has said that if Suljuk won't sign it, they'll impeach him and throw him out. Is Suyok trying to perhaps bait him into doing something like that?

John Everard

Yes, I think that's entirely possible. And I suspect that the phone lines between Sulyk and Orban are burning all the time. The Fidesh will exploit this as far as possible to put Magyar in the worst possible light. I think it's very likely that, yes, the Suluq will try to force an impeachment rather than to go quietly and there'll be tremendous circus around the whole thing. A lot depends, of course, on who then replaces him. There hasn't been much discussion of that. If it becomes clear that Magyar is not going to put one of his own people in, but a neutral figure of some kind who can be relied upon boringly, gray skinnedly to maintain the constitution and to discharge the office of president without fear or favor, then that's a very different proposition from being replaced by a Magyar law to my list.

Andrew Muller

Well, just before our final topic for discussion, we do have one of the musical fanfares of which producer Chris Chermack is so fond.

John Everard

Hit it.

Andrew Muller

Now, it may be about to sound weird that we use Dolly Parton to introduce an item which will be concerned primarily with French working habits. But you'd be surprised, surprised by how few French songs there are about work. For some scarcely imaginable reason, I think we're probably safe from complaining emails at 7pm over there. Everyone's still at lunch. It says here anyway that amid the recent scorching summer weather, it has become a thing for French parents to bring their children to the office on the grounds that the office is air conditioned, whereas home, summer camp or the Junior Accordion Academy are not. Nago, where, where are you on this? Would you be delighted to have your place of work filled with the screams of people's children?

Negar Anger

I mean, you know, children in offices are essentially like small little consultants, right? They don't have billable rates, but they have strong opinions on the snack bar

Andrew Muller

and they get in everyone else's way and stop people from doing their actual work and that kind of thing.

Negar Anger

It's a different kind of water cooler chatter, right? No, look, I think, you know, it's a bigger issue. I think it's a charming topic, but it is a bigger issue about sort of climate and how each government, government is adapting to the climate crisis. You know, I'm an American in London and we had our own heat wave here and it was hard, it was very complicated to get through the day. Just the mental.

Andrew Muller

I feel obliged to insert my traditional derisive Australian scoff at what British people refer to as a heat wave.

Negar Anger

But okay, well, the heat wave is an impact when you sit in what feels like a matchbox of, of a flat, of an apartment and it's hard to find. That cooling refuge is complicated to find. I know France obviously was hit harder than the UK for this heat bubble. But look, it's important, you know, as the song sort of alluded to, this is not a nine to five sort of scenario. Parents are concerned. What do they do for their children? You know, I mean, again, I hate to say something that's out of this world, but it would be great to have sort of more spaces where you have air conditioning units or you have cooler rooms where you can send your children or your elderly sort of parents. Again, I don't have to necessarily be a parent to see the point in this situation, but when you have these sorts of crises, it presents itself where there needs to be sort of adjustments made so that not only you're looking at the well being of your citizens, but you need to have safer schools and workplaces. You know, even here in London, going to a doctor's office, you know, sitting in the lobbies, there is no Air conditioning, obviously, when you go into the office, you meet with the doctor and you're having any clinical work, obviously there's proper air conditioning. But just sitting in the lobby of a hospital, I found it very sort of mind boggling that there was no air conditioning.

Andrew Muller

John, there is a view at large among in particular that Europe is perhaps unnecessarily obdurate on the subject of air conditioning and not having enough of it. Where are you on that?

John Everard

I would never turn air conditioning on. I mean, only wimps use air conditioning.

Negar Anger

I'm a California wimp.

John Everard

Okay, okay.

Andrew Muller

She held her hand up.

John Everard

I was cycling through 44 degrees in the shade. You know, you just adapt to it. It's our planet. It's just the way things. Can I come back to the point about your children in office, please? I mean, I don't think it's possible to say whether they're a nuisance or not. It depends whether you have a. Sharing your office, your own office and how well the child is. There's a whole aspect of this that we haven't yet discussed. Look at it from the child's point of view. Does it make sense in any case, I mean, regard to the fact that this happened because the weather's so hot for the child as young as possible, to actually see what a workplace looks like, see what their parents do all day and try to establish some kind of reality to the thing called daddy or mummy's job. I think there's quite a lot of mileage in there.

Andrew Muller

But is the problem not though, that every child, whatever their parents do, finds whatever it is their parents do, especially for a living, either just boring, ridiculous or embarrassing?

John Everard

Interestingly, we were looking earlier at an article in the Figure, the French newspaper, and they interviewed the children who were saying, no, this is really good. This is really interesting. It's so interesting to see what mummy and daddy do all day.

Andrew Muller

I did it, Nego. What do you think? Or might this be the workplace version of the lovely old joke about the child who comes back from their first day at school and their parent asks, what did you learn? And the kid replies, well, not enough, apparently. I have to go back tomorrow. Could the novelty wear off?

Negar Anger

The novelty will definitely wear off. Again, I think it's something fun for them maybe to do for the day, but if you have to drag your child to work for a week, I'm sure they will find it boring. They can only draw so much, only play so much with maybe potentially other kids. But the reality is, again, you know, imagine if there Are two doctors, Are they going to take their kid to work? Are they going to take. You know, there's a limit to this process, and I think being able to find those solutions is the problem.

Andrew Muller

Negar Anger and John Everard, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, foreign correspondents tend by definition to end up corresponding from foreign places, largely about the various dreadful things occurring on their patch. As a consequence, the good things that happen in those places, the everyday miracles of ordinary life and so forth, tend to get occluded in the popular consciousness, perhaps prompting a certain dehumanizing of the people who live in those places. The idea that the best of humanity is at least as worthy of journalistic study as the worst animates the new book by foreign correspondent Sally Hayden. This is also a love story searching for good in a divided world meets people seeking to forge and maintain basic human connection in forbiddingly difficult circumstances. I spoke to Sally earlier and began by asking where the idea for the book had come from.

Sally Hayden

I think that the idea, in a way, is very simple. So it's basically looking at crisis situations, but through the prism of love. And I actually had the idea about eight years ago, and I do remember telling people about it and them saying, yeah, don't tell anyone about that because someone else is going to write it first. But it wasn't like a competitive thing. It was more that I had the idea. And I just thought, this is a book that I want to write for myself and it's something that I also feel, yeah, maybe other people could connect to. And it's just a different way of looking at some of the crises that I see all of the time.

Andrew Muller

Because on that thought of it being a book you wanted to write for yourself. The subtitle is Searching for Good in a Divided World. Was there something about covering the amount of conflict you have that prompted something of an existential crisis, made you want to go looking for what good there was?

Sally Hayden

Yeah, definitely. So I first had the idea in 2018, and at that point I had been a journalist just for about four years, but I was reporting internationally and already I was seeing, you know, just violence, cruelty, trauma, like a lot of horrible things. And I think that, yeah, you can start to feel that that's all there is. You can just start to feel like I was struggling. I was feeling like people are so cruel. And at the same stage, I was aware that there was this other current that I saw all the time, you know, every day love that people had, not just romantic love. But love for family, love for community, things, you know, it influences people, it, it's really motivating for us and it's always present. But as journalists, it's not necessarily something that we kind of train our eyes to pay attention to or you know, we might mention these relationships, but, but we don't really kind of flag it in the same way that we do other things. And I felt like that made was meant that we're actually not showing the full reality. And so basically the book is a book of love stories. I call them a kind of love stories because it's romantic love, but also love for family, love for community. Across nine different countries facing different types of crises, an economic crisis, war, also state sanctioned repression and natural disaster as well. And yeah, it's, it's just kind of showing the human experiences of people in the middle of those, but particularly through the present moment.

Andrew Muller

Love, because you're right, news coverage by definition tends to get caught up in what is news and that often forgets to remind people that in all of these places, normal life does find a way to go on. There's a line in the the epilogue, this is not a spoiler, where you write quite correctly that in places like this the abnormal becomes normal. That being the case, did you notice or have you noticed anything different about the way people form relationships in such situations?

Sally Hayden

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of different changes and limitations, I would say. And I think with the book I wasn't trying to kind of sugarcoat anything or pretend that those things don't exist. So it's quite interesting. Like in Ukraine, for example, I met the wives of soldiers fighting on the front line and they were telling me, you know, they're worried about a kind of regression to more traditional ways of being because of the roles that they've ended up playing are quite traditional gender roles, whereas maybe they weren't like that before. And in other places I also like in Mosul, I met a couple that got married under ISIS and fell in love at that time. And they were saying that a lot of the couples that got married at that time got divorced because the rules there meant that they didn't have the capacity so much to get to know each other. So yeah, I think that it does change things and it's not necessarily that love triumphs overall, but I wanted to show that love does still exist in these situations and that it at least plays a role.

Andrew Muller

How did you go about pitching this idea to your subjects? Because I have often found myself that it is a useful way into stories in conflict zones, if you can find a way to talk to people about anything other than the actual conflict, they're usually really happy to talk about something other than the obvious. Did you get a sense of that from the people you spoke to?

Sally Hayden

Yeah, I mean, I think if you were a little bit confused and some. But some were also happy because they were saying, you know, what happens when a crisis kind of takes place in your. Your area or your country is that they almost felt like there's a flattening of them as humans, that you become like, you know, people don't realize that you have humor, that you have love, that you have these different aspects of your personality, and they start seeing you either as a victim or I'm talking about civilians here. You know, there's kind of like this flattening of their lives and of their personality, and that also can hurt a lot. And I think that people, when I was asking these questions, they were like, yeah, it's so nice to be asked about these things. And when I explained what I was trying to do, you know, in Japan, for example, when I was talking to people after the Cena, like people who survived the tsunami or in Ukraine as well, they were like, actually, we have experiences that we want to share because we never imagined that we would go through this terrible thing. And we've learned a lot, and we feel like it's actually helpful for other people to know what we have learned. So I think there is a. So a feeling that people wanted to share to form connections with people in other countries, and they had the idea that, you know, these situations aren't always so isolated, that different. Obviously, every situation is its own kind of unique thing, but there are similarities in there, particularly in the way that human relationships kind of get affected.

Andrew Muller

I mean, the book, as you've already mentioned, does cover a very wide breadth of locations. Syria, Nigeria, Ukraine, Rwanda, Iraq, Japan, among others. Do you get the sense that still there is an equally diverse range of courtship rituals around the world, or has our interconnectedness kind of universalized that as well?

Sally Hayden

Yeah, I mean, the book isn't just about romantic love, so I wouldn't say I'm an expert on courtship, but I do think that it was interesting talking, for example, in Mosul since isis. ISIS occupied the city for two years and now is obviously gone. And people were still saying, now more women, for example, wear white wedding dresses because they see on social media that other people do that. Or. Yeah, I think that probably people are much more aware of what's happening elsewhere. In the world. And obviously, I mean, social media has just changed courtship, I would say everywhere. I mean, I talk about that in the Ghana chapter as well, about people finding dates on hookup apps or whatever you want to call them.

Andrew Muller

So.

Sally Hayden

Yeah.

Andrew Muller

Well, just as a final thought then, and for all that you've already explained that this isn't any kind of dating manual, is there? Does it strike you that you come away from researching this with or that people might come away from reading it with any useful advice about how to conduct themselves in this realm, in countries at peace?

Sally Hayden

Yeah, I mean, I think the book, it's more about love as not just romantic but like the idea of like kindness among ourselves and finding connections and yeah, just goodness in humanity, the fact that it exists. And I think that sometimes we all need to be reminded of that and the, you know, the benefits you can get from forming connections even in your own community. I think that that's a big message of the book.

Andrew Muller

That was Sally Hayden speaking to me earlier. This is also a love story. Searching for Good in a Divided World is available now. That is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Negar, Anger and Everard. Today's show was produced by Chris Chermack and researched by Nke Martin. Our sound engineer was Steph Changu. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening,

John Everard

Sam.