Former MI6 Chief Richard Moore on the Changing World Order

ELI5/TLDR

Britain’s recently retired spy chief sits on a stage at Davos and gives a calm, careful tour of a world he describes as more contested, with fewer guardrails, than at any point in his 38-year career. His one big argument: Ukraine is the test that matters most, because Russia would already have lost without China quietly supplying the chemicals and components that keep its war going. Along the way he debunks the James Bond fantasy of his old job, explains why intelligence-sharing survives diplomatic spats, and admits the front line in Ukraine now looks like a dystopian video game where drones cause most of the deaths.

The Full Story

The world has lost its guardrails

The interviewer opens with a line she heard at dinner from a Dow Jones executive: nobody can tell whether this is the last Davos of the old world order or the first Davos of the new one. Moore declines the drama. These shifts are never a single moment, he says, just “a gradual reckoning.” But the substance underneath is real.

“I spent 38 years in intelligence and diplomacy and I’ve never seen the world as contested and with as few guardrails as it has at the moment.”

He counts the pressures on his fingers. The rise of China as an economic, political and military power. Putin’s war in Ukraine, “the most blatant challenge to the international order” since 1945, still unresolved. The rise of other powers making their own mark, India and Turkey among them. And an unconventional US president who thinks the old methods of statecraft have not delivered and wants to do things differently.

Richard Moore ran MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, from 2020 until his retirement. By tradition the chief is the only publicly named officer in the service, and signs documents as “C” in green ink. He handed over to Blaise Metreweli, the first woman in the role. (The transcript mangles her name and at one point invents “Anne Flis”; auto-captions struggle with proper nouns.)

Why the China embassy and Greenland are sideshows

Two of the week’s headlines get the deflation treatment. On Britain approving a giant new Chinese embassy in London, Moore is “slightly bemused.” Countries have embassies; Britain has one in Beijing. The new building consolidates seven scattered Chinese sites into one, which his domestic-security counterpart at MI5 actually prefers, because one place is easier to watch than seven.

On Greenland and Trump’s interest in it, Moore separates the noise from the signal. There is a genuine strategic problem: as the polar ice melts, new sea lanes open in the far north, and Russia (an Arctic power) and China (which has invented the label “near-Arctic power” for itself) both want to exploit them. But the problem is solvable without drama. A largely forgotten 1951 US-Denmark agreement, signed at the start of the Cold War with no expiry date, already lets the US deploy whatever troops and equipment it needs into Greenland for defense.

“I very much hope that we can be respectful of the national security needs of the United States… We can all work together and we can find a way where we satisfy the administration’s perfectly genuine needs.”

Does the rupture of trust between Europe and Washington threaten intelligence-sharing? Moore says no, and his reasoning is worth keeping. Sharing survives the spats because it is not a favour.

“It’s not an act of charity for the United States to share with the United Kingdom. It’s not an act of charity for us to do likewise. It works for both of us.”

The real story: without China, Russia loses

This is the spine of the whole interview. Moore keeps steering back to Ukraine and to one underappreciated fact. The eye-catching headlines go to North Korean troops fighting in Kursk or the Iranian drones that arrived early in the war. But the thing actually keeping Putin’s army supplied is China.

“Without China, Russia would have lost. It’s as simple as that.”

Specifically: Chinese chemicals go into Russian artillery shells, and Chinese components go into Russian drones and missiles. So when people talk about pushing back against Russia and China as two separate problems, Moore sees one. The most urgent lever is Ukraine.

What would a good outcome look like? Moore credits Zelensky with being willing to make extraordinary sacrifices for peace, including conceding, in practice, 20% of his country to stop the killing. But any deal needs real guarantees, because Russia’s war did not start in February 2022. It started in 2014, paused, and resumed. A ceasefire without guarantees just buys Putin time to come back.

And there is a colder point underneath. A deal requires Putin to want one, and Moore saw no sign of that in office and sees none now.

“Until the pain level goes up for Putin… when he begins to feel that his grip on power might be threatened if he carries on in Ukraine, he’ll come and do a deal with you.”

How to raise the pain? Nothing exotic, he says: more air defense so Ukraine can protect its people, permission to use long-range missiles to hit Russia “back in the deep” rather than fighting only on Ukrainian soil, and plain cash, because Ukraine’s defense industry is still under-capitalised and money simply translates into more drones. He also names what he is watching on his television as war crimes, civilians bombed out of their homes, the power grid destroyed in midwinter, and worries aloud that the world has become “normalized” to it.

The new tradecraft: amateurs on the ground, genius from afar

Moore is taken with the Ukrainian operation that smuggled drones deep inside Russia hidden in trucks. Drivers who had no idea what they were carrying parked up; at the chosen moment the truck roofs came off remotely and the drones lifted away, flown from Kyiv. He compares it to the Israeli operation that turned pagers into bombs across Hezbollah’s ranks: a new pattern of warfare built on cheap operatives on the ground plus brilliant technology from outside.

But he insists the shape is “new and old.” For the resonance, he reaches back to Operation Telemark, the 1943 sabotage by Norwegian commandos (with Britain’s Special Operations Executive) of a Nazi heavy-water plant that was feeding the German nuclear effort. Technology has always been part of the trade, he says; he joined “in antiquity” in 1987 and learned to type on a manual typewriter, and the service was doing secret writing back in the early 1900s. The order of magnitude has changed; the instinct has not.

Killing the James Bond myth

A long stretch is gentle myth-busting about the job itself. The fireside recruitment with a glass of sherry? “This is not how we do it nowadays” — apply online. He was tapped on the shoulder by an Oxford tutor (whom he politely refuses to name) who asked if he fancied “an alternative field of foreign affairs”; the naive 20-year-old had no idea what that meant until he turned up at a building off the Mall.

On the double life: as chief he was the only named officer, so everyone else operates undercover, and even close family carry the burden of discretion. He told his own children in their mid-teens. On the lone-wolf 007 fantasy:

“It’s a lone operator who uses violence very frequently, is almost always insubordinate to M… that’s not what you want. You want teamwork.”

What the service actually looks for: people who are entrepreneurial and adaptable but, crucially, with “a very strong ethical center,” precisely because the work puts them in ethically difficult situations built on deceit. No “Walter Mittys” (fantasists), no large egos. Vetting is exhaustive and demands you surrender a lot of privacy. A quarter to a third of staff are now proper technologists, and even a classic case officer has to be digitally literate, alert both to the threat technology poses to operations and the advantage it offers.

AI, China, and the unglamorous future

AI cuts both ways. It helps identify the brave individuals inside hostile states who might be willing to cooperate. It also makes the surveillance environment far more dangerous for the agents MI6 must keep hidden, a duty Moore says the service has an “unrivaled track record” on. He gently corrects the interviewer’s use of “hackers”: at Davos these people call themselves cyber-security specialists. Retaining them is the hard part, because the firms “on the promenade” will pay them far more, so, as he puts it, “they got a lot of love.”

On China more broadly, he refuses the binary that a chaotic America inevitably pushes Europe into Beijing’s arms. His answer is to nurture NATO, “the most successful alliance in history.” China cannot be ignored, Britain has over £100 billion in bilateral trade with it, and even keeping agentic AI under human control will eventually require talking to the Chinese. But he is blunt about Chinese cyber penetration of the UK and intimidation of diaspora communities, which he calls unacceptable. The posture: robust engagement where cooperation is possible, very firm red lines where it is not.

The drones discussion ends on a genuinely bleak image. Drones now cause something like 80 to 90% of battlefield casualties in Ukraine. The front is not a WWI trench line but small groups of people who almost never expose themselves to the sky, because drones are everywhere. Ukrainian sea drones, he notes, drove an entire Russian navy out of the Black Sea. He calls the whole picture “very dystopian.”

Closing fragments

Audience questions draw out a few more. On who follows Putin (73): impossible to say. Unlike China, where the Communist Party provides an institutional structure even under the most powerful leader since Mao, modern Russia has no real structure, just competing power centres that Putin plays against each other. His successor will inherit the plate-spinning. Moore deflects with his favourite line about the limits of his old trade:

“My job was to steal secrets, not to solve mysteries.”

On Turkey: people projected their own hopes onto it in the early 2000s; Erdogan is a dominant leader who wins elections and delivers for Turks, even if the West dislikes his methods, and the country is “utterly critical” by geography alone. On the Canadian PM’s call for “middle powers” to band together for strategic autonomy: keep NATO and the Five Eyes intelligence pact (UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), but accept the legitimate, long-standing American demand that Europe and Canada finally pay for their own defense, because Europe’s ability to deploy hard power is “woefully inadequate.”

Key Takeaways

Moore’s central claim: “Without China, Russia would have lost.” Chinese chemicals feed Russian artillery shells; Chinese components feed its drones and missiles.
Intelligence-sharing survives diplomatic ruptures because it is mutual self-interest, not charity, on both sides.
The new Chinese embassy in London consolidates seven sites into one, which MI5 finds easier to monitor; Moore treats it as a non-issue.
Greenland has a real strategic dimension (melting ice opening Arctic sea lanes for Russia and China) but is solvable; a no-expiry 1951 US-Denmark treaty already lets the US base whatever it needs there.
A durable Ukraine peace needs hard guarantees because the war began in 2014, paused, and resumed; a deal also requires Putin to actually want one, which Moore has never seen evidence of.
Levers to raise Putin’s pain threshold: more air defense, permission to strike deep inside Russia with long-range missiles, and cash for Ukraine’s under-capitalised drone industry.
New warfare pattern (Ukraine’s truck-smuggled drones, Israel’s exploding pagers): cheap operatives on the ground plus advanced tech from afar, an echo of WWII sabotage like Operation Telemark.
The 007 image is misleading; MI6 prizes teamwork, ethics and digital literacy over lone gunmen. A quarter to a third of staff are now technologists.
Drones now cause an estimated 80-90% of battlefield casualties in Ukraine; sea drones pushed Russia’s navy out of the Black Sea.
Russia, unlike China, has no institutional succession structure, only competing power centres Putin balances, which makes life after Putin genuinely unpredictable.
Five Eyes (UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) is described as the “jewel in the crown” of Western intelligence cooperation, and not a sentimental one: all five contribute.

Claude’s Take

This is a good example of a smart, disciplined official saying things that are reassuring in tone and occasionally sharp in substance, while giving away almost nothing he would not want quoted. Discount the soothing register and a few real signals remain. The Russia-as-Chinese-client point is the keeper: it reframes the Ukraine war as a China problem with Russian troops, which is a cleaner mental model than the usual “Russia plus a cast of helpers.” It also conveniently flatters the Western policy preference (lean harder, fund Ukraine, the cause is solvable), so treat it as a true claim deployed for a purpose rather than a neutral one.

The myth-busting and recruitment chat are charming and almost entirely content-free, exactly what you would expect a retired chief to offer a friendly Davos stage. He is also a NATO institutionalist to the core; every hard question (China, Trump, middle-power autonomy) gets routed back to “nurture the alliance,” which is sincere but also a way of not answering. The genuinely useful texture is in the war’s physical reality: the 80-90% drone-casualty figure and the Black Sea naval rout are the kind of concrete detail that survives the spin.

Score 7. Articulate, credible, occasionally illuminating, and a clear distillation of how the Western security establishment is thinking right now. It loses points for being, by design, more performance than revelation: a man whose entire career trained him to steal secrets is not about to give any away on a conference stage.