From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal.

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This week, we're going to take a look at the state of the world, the condition of democracy, and the challenges facing the West through the eyes of a former British Prime Minister.

Rishi Sunak was leader of the British Conservative Party

and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2022 to 2024 when he was defeated at the general election

last July by Kyr Starmer's Labour Party. Before that, Sunak served as Chancellor of the Exchequer,

that's Britain's slightly eccentric name for its finance minister or the

equivalent of Treasury Secretary. He entered politics quite late in life, having been an investment

banker with Goldman Sachs and a very successful hedge fund man. He was the first Brit of Indian

heritage to lead the UK government. He remains a member of Parliament sitting on the opposition benches

with the rest of his conservative colleagues, a somewhat diminished band of conservative MPs,

and he continues to take a keen interest in geopolitics and economics. He recently became a visiting

fellow at the Hoover Institution and is working on projects on how to strengthen democracy

and how to deal with the challenges that the West faces. Last month, he wrote an op-ed in the journal calling for a new partnership, a broad alliance of democracies to defend Western values. And Rishi Sunak, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, joins me now. Mr. Sunak, thanks very much indeed for joining free expression. Oh, it's great to be with you, Jerry. Thanks for having me. So I want to start with a very interesting op-ed you wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month,

calling for this new partnership of democracies to face the various challenges that we're facing.

One of the things you said in that, I'll quote, you said, if the democracies failed to adjust to these new times,

and I quote, let an authoritarian axis shape a new world order

where Mike makes right, where technology bolsters authoritarianism and curtails individual liberty,

and where trade is a weapon of coercion, that's the risk. I suppose a cynic might say,

hasn't that horse already bolted? No, I don't think so. I think we're clearly living in a time that's very different to the one

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