Susan Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist and host of its new weekly podcast, The Global Politico.

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NEW YORK — Tony Blair thinks Americans are way too worried about Donald Trump—and not enough about Bernie Sanders.


The former British prime minister, a perennial lightning rod for controversy on both sides of the Atlantic, has in recent months chosen to return to the political fray, warning of the “destiny-changing” dangers of the British exit from the European Union and insisting—how, he’s not exactly sure—that last year’s “Brexit” vote can and should still be undone before it’s too late.

In a new interview for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on global affairs, he tells me that he’s sure “the same feelings that gave rise to Brexit gave rise to the election of Donald Trump”—but that the left-wing populism peddled by Sanders and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain are not the answer, either.

Blair, the onetime wunderkind of British politics who led the Labour Party and the country for 10 years from 1997 to 2007 preaching a Clintonian centrism he called the “Third Way” only to see his tenure end amid recriminations over his support for Republican George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, still punches hardest when he’s hitting to his left. In our conversation, he bashed today’s liberal leaders in both countries for “solutions that look back to the ‘60s or ‘70s” and for preaching a form of feel-good “identity politics” that will flop as an answer to Trumpism.

“You can go for what are very good-sounding things like, we’re going to abolish tuition fees, or we’re going to give you this for free, or that for free,” he says, calling out both America’s Democrats and Britain’s Labourites. “In today’s world, and in particular, in the absence of a vigorous change-making center, that’s very attractive. But I don’t think it’s answer, and I’m not sure it would win an election. Maybe it would, but even if it did, it would worry me. Because in the end, I think a lot of these solutions aren’t really progressive. And they don’t correspond to what the problem of the modern world is.”

But it’s Blair’s comments about Trump as much as his disdain for Sanders and Corbyn that are likely to infuriate many U.S liberals.

Just a few months ago, Blair stirred outrage when he told his former communications chief Alastair Campbell in a British GQ interview that Democrats “just go mental with you” at even the suggestion of working with Trump and that the divisive U.S. president who has spoken of the mainstream press as “enemies of the people” may have a point about his “polarized and partisan” media coverage.

Blair did not back away from that in our interview, saying it’s a mistake “just to go in flat-out opposition” to Trump, that the president may well end up as a traditional Republican at least on foreign policy and arguing Trump has “actually been helpful” in the Middle East, where Blair has served as a mediator for the quartet of Western powers trying to achieve a long-elusive peace settlement.

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Trump, he says, has correctly identified “an extraordinary and one-off opportunity” to move toward a deal between Israel and Arab states that may finally be willing to “move on” from the Palestinian issue. “I do think there’s a big opportunity there, and I think that the White House understands that,” Blair tells me, voicing an optimism that few other peace-process veterans share.

“I can’t afford to be in a position of just treating President Trump as if he’s part of a sort of interesting comedy show,” Blair says.



***

Still only 64 even after a full decade out of power, Blair retains the sheen of global political celebrity, at least on this side of the Atlantic. He is polished and trim, and seems ready to spar with anyone in his current signature outfit of sharp navy suit and bright pink tie, not so much a retiree as a political exile who has ventured back into the fray at a time when the fray hasn’t exactly welcomed him.

Indeed, just a few days before our interview, he’s caused the British tabloids to explode in yet another anti-Blair frenzy (and gotten the full Maureen Dowd-mocking treatment on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Review section) by releasing a report from his think tank proposing tougher anti-immigration policies in exchange for abandoning Brexit. As a longtime immigration proponent whose government opened the doors to make it easier for non-Brits to live and work in the United Kingdom, Blair faced a perhaps understandably skeptical response.

How harsh was it?

“Butt Out Blair – You Ruined This Country,” screamed one headline from The Daily Star. Others were just as scathing, if less coherent. “Tony Blair Is the Reason That We Are Leaving the EU,” editorialized The Daily Express.

When we talk, Blair claims to be unfazed by the flap, blaming the fury on “right-wing media in the U.K. that’s controlled” by a bunch of “old men who are in favor of Brexit” and choosing to ignore the fact that the left is none too happy with him either. “Nowadays,” he says, “if you step out at all into any area of public controversy, you’re going to get a bucket of something unpleasant poured over you, so you get used to that.”

But it’s almost impossible to overstate the extent to which Blair is excoriated across the British political spectrum these days—“his reputational currency has fallen as his bank account has swelled” over the past decade, says his old colleague Campbell, acknowledging not just Blair’s political unpopularity but the opprobrium he’s gotten for what’s perceived as buck-raking from advising autocrats from the Persian Gulf to Kazakhstan.

Even those who don’t outright condemn Blair see him as a man without a party, tilting at Brexit without being able to propose a realistic scenario by which it could be overturned, given that neither Labour nor the ruling Conservative Party is willing to officially campaign on undoing it. “Brits hate him. They really hate him,” says one American who spent the better part of two decades living in London. “His international stature, even now, masks how low is the esteem in which he is held back home.”

In contrast, Blair has remained well regarded here, and tends to get positive notices from centrist-minded American commentators who see him as a rare liberal willing to take a moment away from Trump-bashing and Brexit-bemoaning to trash the rising populism and “riding the politics of fear,” as he put it to me, that is now increasingly seen as the only acceptable response to angry voting publics in both countries. Just as Hillary Clinton is touring the country now peddling a version of What Happened in her campaign memoir, Blair acknowledges that he and others in the Clintonian middle opened the way for this challenge—they became “complacent” in power, he says, entitled “managers of the status quo”—though as with Clinton there are many critics who feel he is hardly introspective enough about his own role in the current mess.

I asked Blair if all the political condemnation back home has made it paradoxically somewhat easier for him speak out, as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman suggested in a highly laudatory column on him a while back.

Blair somewhat testily rejected the premise of my question, reminding me that he had one of modern Britain’s longest winning streaks before going on to blame much of his current plight on the political polarization of the British media. “One should never exaggerate this,” he says. “I mean, I did win three elections in the U.K.”

Whatever you think of him, there’s no doubt that Blair’s re-emergence as among the most outspoken anti-populist leaders on either side of the Atlantic is a striking contrast to the two American presidents with whom he partnered so closely over his decade as prime minister. Bill Clinton, Blair’s friend and fellow “Third Way” centrist at the start of the 1990s, has been surprisingly muted in public since his wife’s stunning election defeat last fall. And Bush, whose invasion of Iraq Blair enthusiastically supported and has never been able to live down, opposed Trump but has remained almost resolutely out of national politics since leaving office in 2009.

Beyond the shock of the Brexit vote, it’s hard to say exactly why Blair’s jumped in now, though I found his critique of the backward-looking nature of Trumpist populism to be perhaps unintentionally relevant to his own decision to speak out publicly once again.

“The world is moving so fast,” he says, “if you get stuck on what I call the sort of hard shoulder of nostalgia, the world is just going to pass you by.”