Why Trump Sides With Putin

23:23Fiona Hill:I mean, that is more difficult for him. But right now, Trump is playing to form. It's the form that Putin expects. And I'm pretty sure that Putin, perhaps misplaced in any case, feels very confident that he can manage everything that's happening. But I say that could be misplaced. But it's not for the reasons of Trump suddenly getting religion to use this, you know, kind of metaphor and pull it out a bit further. One last question from Putin's side of the playing board. You mentioned a couple of times that Putin thinks in terms of power. But when he thinks in terms of power, he thinks in terms of military power, espionage power, maybe natural resource power.

23:59He doesn't seem to have a very sophisticated grasp of the way economies work. And so one of the things that has happened since February of 22, is that Russia's slide toward becoming a Chinese economic colony does seem to have accelerated. And he will, if he emerges from this Ukraine war, even with a seeming military success, with a change in the borders or a friendlier regime in Ukraine or withdrawal of American support from Ukraine or Poland or the Baltics, he still has the problem that it's China who pays his bills. And does he think about things like that?

24:30Fiona Hill:I'm sure he does, because he certainly had plenty of warnings in the past. But I think, you know, at this point, And, you know, again, it seems that this is the trajectory that he's on. He's not really thinking of a period when peace breaks out. He's become a wartime president. And I think he feels that he can keep a wartime economy, you know, ticking along, you know, for quite some time and maybe put off then the kinds of problems that he will inevitably face. I mean, we're seeing all kinds of problems in the US economy and the US economy is immensely resilient because of, you know, the structure of it, the nature of it.

25:02Fiona Hill:And the Russian economy is resilient in similar but very different ways, more related to autarky and just the vastness of its natural resources. But that, of course, makes it very difficult to marshal them and to move into those value-added chains that we expect of a more sophisticated economy. And Russia had been moving in that direction up until the full-on invasion of Ukraine, but it was quite difficult because its economic model was running out of steam. and the wall has injected a new head of steam into it. Now, the one thing that Putin clearly doesn't care about is human capital. And I mean, that is also very interesting because you wouldn't in that regard.

25:42Fiona Hill:And this is why I think President Trump just doesn't get Putin at all. He cannot understand why you would slaughter all of these people that you actually need to make your economy work. Even with a miraculous shift to AI, you're still going to need people. And that's what Putin has done. And he has squandered the future of his human capital. A lot of people are working admittedly offshore, particularly in the Gulf, in other places, and still contributing to the Russian economy. You look down the line on the idea of economic recovery, the idea of innovation that's not just related to defense and to innovation on the battlefield.

26:16Fiona Hill:That's one of the areas that Putin has likely squandered. And of course, he's completely eroded trust. And although other countries, you know, look to Russia right now and, you know, still want to factor them in as a great power, they no longer think of Russia as a superpower. And they absolutely certainly do not think of Russia as a technical, innovative, economic superpower. And as you said, it's much likely to end up being some kind of appendage of China at the end of all of this, even more so than it already is. Yeah. I mean, when you mentioned Putin's belief in might makes right, I mean, one of the most striking legacies of his rule is going to be the definitive end of Russia as a mighty state.

26:54I mean, it may overpower Ukraine. It can certainly scare Estonia. But if you think, and you used to do this kind of work, if you project the world of 2036, 10 years from now, we'll have two superpowers, the United States and China. We'll have a number of countries that are economically very important, but not militarily strong. India, the European Union, if you think of that as a power player, possibly Japan, possibly Britain. Where's Russia? I mean, maybe there with Japan and Britain as countries of some economic power because of their natural resources, some military power, but nothing like an India, let alone a China or the United States in the way that Putin imagined he might be when he started the Ukraine war.

27:31Fiona Hill:Yeah, and actually, I mean, Russia was on before this. And in fact, before seizing Crimea, which I think was the moment where Putin shifted the trajectory of his presidency, you know, Russia was up there in the larger economic powers. There was a whole goal of being not just in the G7 or the G8, but being one of the top five or six global economic powers. And at one point, it looked like that might be possible. But as you're saying, that's not likely to be where Russia is, although it shifts in its trade patterns still, the commodities, that might bring something. But I think that the world is going to be a very complex place.

28:07Fiona Hill:If I look up to 2036, I think we're squandering ourselves, as the United States, some of that, you know, bases, those fundamental bases of power, which, I mean, you've been pointing out in many of your podcasts and the things that you've, you know, been writing and with your colleagues in the Atlantic. You know, I think that we're going to look more at a much more regional bases of power. But, of course, the United States and China are both going to still, well, the United States still, let's say, is still going to have the ability to shape things in the world. And China is increasingly going to have more ability, particularly in terms of technology, research, education, all kinds of innovation to shape the way that everybody else responds but i wouldn't rule out india brazil you know even south africa which the united states seems to be in a fight in at the moment and european countries perhaps not in the eu configuration but there's just been such a jolt to europe that you know we shouldn't rule out some constellation of european countries maybe in northern europe scandinavians the bulks the poles you know and others actually really stepping up there, you know, in response to what's happening, especially what's happening in Greenland and becoming much more military place.

29:11Fiona Hill:Finland is significant, you know, as a military, we've still got Turkey as a major military power. So, you know, things could change quite a lot in this next decade. Well, the most dramatic slap in the face, and I can't quite do this math in the head while I'm talking live. But as I sort of think, pull up what I recall the figures and just do a quick calculation. We're not very far away from Poland overtaking Russia in the size of its economy. Yes. And Poland is spending about 5 % now of its GDP. This puts Russia back to where it was in the 1600s when Poland was the stronger, at least economically.

29:45Fiona Hill:Well, and remember the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was actually Europe's biggest country and most significant for that period up until when you're talking about. Let me ask you then to take now to change the lens back to Washington. There's always been this strange, mysterious, difficult to explain, but unmistakable to observe affinity that Trump has had for Putin. And that does seem to continue. The big Trump idea for ending the war in Ukraine is to cut off the flow of information, reduce the flow of supplies to Ukraine and put pressure on them to yield to Russia's terms. Do you have any sense of why not just Trump, but Steve Witkoff and people around him think that that's such a good idea?

30:24Fiona Hill:It's how they think about power and the manifestation of power. They don't think about we the people, as in, you know, you are and what is it, 340 million people who live in the United States or the 140 million and declining in Russia. They don't think anybody has agency apart from big guys and usually men, of course. and if there are no checks and balances and you have unfettered power, then that is kind of the epitome of might and might makes right. As Trump himself has said over and over again, I mean, most recently in the New York Times lengthy interview, he sees no constraint apart from his own.

31:01Fiona Hill:And that's how they see Putin. And indeed, Putin has whittled away all of the checks and balances in his system. He seems to be at this pinnacle of this vertical of power and to be unchecked, unconstrained in every way imaginable. And so for them, he's the guy to deal with. I mean, as Steve Wyckoff and Trump as real estate moguls, they'd go to the guy who was in charge and then get their guys on lower levels to deal with things from there. And I mean, it's really the kind of power that Trump has. I remember in Trump 1.0, the former US ambassador to Hungary, who was a good friend of Trump's. He was a jeweler from New York and known him for many, many, many years.

31:42Fiona Hill:And he was talking about Viktor Orban. And in fact, I think it was an interview in The Atlantic, of all things, in which he said, this is what Trump wants, it's what Donald Trump wants. He wants to be that kind of leader. And in many respects, that means that's what Putin's got on him because he knows that Trump needs his respect, his validation. And I saw that over and over again in Trump 1.0 where Trump would want to call Putin because Putin had said something nice about him on international television, or he'd want to talk directly to him. And of course, those discussions are mediated for Trump.

32:21Fiona Hill:And for Whitcoff as well, they don't speak Russian, so it's always through a translator. They hear what's being presented to them. They don't get the sense of the man and how he's making fun of them and what he really thinks. So this is always problematic. They see what they want to see, which is their own validation in Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin sees that, and he just gives them what they want. Is it all about that kind of petty vanity? Of course. I mean, that's at the root of things. I mean, I'm sorry. I mean, it's just, you know, from years of observation of this, Putin knows exactly how to do it.

32:52Fiona Hill:I mean, I, you know, many others who study, you know, kind of Russia, we've all been subjected to this. There's a famous episode of Putin helping a Russian politician who, there's no reason why he would help him. And I was related to this story by the politician himself, who was done a pretty significant favor by Putin. And this person has actually told the story publicly. But when we asked him why, and he said, Putin said to him, when he'd asked the same question, well, you never know who you might turn out to be, or when I might need something from you. So this is kind of, you know, Putin plays to vanities, he plays to vulnerabilities, he plays into times of need, because he never knows when he might need something.

33:31Fiona Hill:And they act in the same way. I mean, Wyckoff, Trump. I mean, they're all kind of birds of a similar feather, but unfortunately, they're not quite as good at this as Vladimir Putin because he's had years of training and honing these skills as a KGB agent and 25 years of being president of Russia in a pretty vicious political environment. It's like the opening scene of The Godfather. One day and that day may never come. I will ask a service of you in return. Exactly right. Exactly right. And the thing is, they all think in similar frames because of where they operated, real estate. I mean, it couldn't be any more similar to the kinds of environments in which Putin operates in.

34:09Fiona Hill:But the thing is, Putin thinks of himself as the head of state, of a state with millennia of history. He talks of himself in that regard. He's got an idea about being cloaked in the mantle of the power of the state and the church. He sees himself as the heir to all kinds of emperors and even empresses with Catherine the Great. Trump thinks of just himself. And if it's, you know, he's thinking of American heroes, it's just as he defines them, not as they might define him. One of the things, if you say it's about vanity, that it is disquieting about all this. There are, of course, all these theories, and I never pretend to know if any of them are true or if none of them are true.

34:45There are theories that there is compromise. There are theories that there is bribery. There are theories that Trump is looking forward to some future payoff. And I must say, as contemptible as all of those things would be, they're somehow less pathetic than he's looking for compliments. But when you see Trump in the Oval Office with someone else's Nobel Prize in his greedy little hands, with a smile on his face as if the stolen cup of apple juice tastes just as good as the cup of apple juice that was intended for you, it occurs to you, yeah, maybe it's just as dumb and pathetic and cringey and embarrassing as that, that he just loves the compliments.

35:21Fiona Hill:It is cringey. And I felt like that many, many times when I was in his presence with world leaders. I would cringe because he was also making himself incredibly obvious. And that's what Putin is. He's the master of obviously domineering and dominating people. He's the master of seeing the obvious, but he's also the master of digging a bit deeper. Now, in terms of compromising material, we've all got all kinds of information on Trump and the enrichment of him and his family, meme coins. I mean, it's all in plain sight. And so, I mean, what more do we need to know about? We've got the Epstein files and all the scandals about, you know, all of that at the moment.

35:59Fiona Hill:I mean, Putin doesn't need any of that. I remember once saying to one of the Russian ambassadors, because I was supposed to be obviously giving them the kind of equivalent of, you know, daymarsh about interference in the United States elections. And he ran off a whole host of different things that different people, Americans had done and said, can you blame us for that, Miss Hill? And I thought, got me. Of course not, because we do plenty of things ourselves, you know, that actually lay ourselves open to this kind of manipulation, all the mistakes that we make that turn out to be fateful. And, you know, we can't blame Russia for everything here.

36:35It's not a question of blaming them.

36:36Fiona Hill:No, I'm blaming them for finding information for using that because, again, we're producing plenty of these scandalous episodes and problems ourselves, and they just know how to use them. So I'm just saying that I'm never been really convinced that Putin had something that was so off the charts in terms of its radioactivity that could bring Trump down because so many other things have failed to do so. Why can't Trump see that Putin is less powerful than he was three years ago? I think it's because of his frame from the Cold War in the 1980s. I think it's still that idea. And he said it many times in relationship to Ukraine that Russia was just a big power.

37:15Fiona Hill:He thinks of it as just as Trump as Putin did. But it's not. I mean, that's the thing I find baffling. The Soviet Union certainly was. And from in the first decade of Putin's reign, Russia looked that way, whether it was or not. But it doesn't look that way now. Yes, but just to Trump, because he doesn't really listen to the assessments of you, me or anyone else on this score. For him, it's the size of the country. So we're getting back to what we were talking about before. Why does he want Greenland? Because it's 2 % bigger, 10 ,000 square miles bigger than the Louisiana Purchase. So it's the biggest real estate deal in history.

37:50Fiona Hill:Who's got the biggest real estate in the world? It's Vladimir Putin. You know, it's kind of, he's been, you know, sort of described as, you know, the richest man in the world by everybody from Elon Musk, who clearly is, you know, not Vladimir Putin. He's not going to cash out and, you know, kind of run around the world, you know, behaving like a tech mogul. But everybody thinks of this still in terms of it's just its size and the way to it on the world stage. And the animosity to Ukraine and Zelensky, is that personal? Is that a grudge about 2019 and Zelensky not doing what Trump wanted for the election?

38:21Is there something more going on there? It seems to be a real antipathy. And in Vance's case, I get that it's ideology. Vance wants to bring far-right powers to rule in Europe, and Zelensky's success would validate the liberal parties. But Trump, it just seems very – what is it?

38:41Fiona Hill:It's those things that you've laid out completely, but I think there's also another edge to it that gets back to what we've just talked about. I think he's envious in some respects about Zelensky, though he would never, ever say that. Because Zelensky's got all the accolades, rightly so, being a real wartime president. I mean, it being somebody who didn't back down, you know, in the face of attempts to push him out. He's also a small guy. And Trump thinks in a small country, though, you know, territorialized Ukraine isn't a small country. And he's somebody who has been given the wartime mantle of a Winston Churchill.

39:16Fiona Hill:And Trump hates that. It's just like Machado getting the Nobel Prize. I mean, it's all just, you know, and Zelensky just hasn't backed down. And Zelensky's had the temerity to take him on, you know, on a number of occasions to push back. He hates that. I know talking in the way I'm about to talk would get me thrown out of a National Security Council meeting for moralism and so on. But is there an issue that just that Trump is wicked and cowardly and he hates people who are good and brave? It's, yeah, I mean, look, that's a cartoon version of it. But I mean, obviously, one would, you know, kind of say yes.

39:51Fiona Hill:I mean, in some cases, that is the case, but not in all cases, because there are, you know, sometimes when he does express admiration for something that somebody's done, but it doesn't necessarily directly affect him. I think that's kind of the problem is when somebody takes something that he thinks is his, a Nobel Peace Prize, the attention of the world as a wartime president or somebody who's at the statue of Winston Churchill, you know, kind of literally. Then he was soured on Churchill for a while when everyone kept calling Zelensky or comparing it to, you know, kind of Zelensky to Churchill.

40:23Fiona Hill:So I think it comes into that frame in which his own personal validation is at stake. But I think that he can admire, you know, other people because I've seen that. I mean, he isn't a cartoon character. He's complicated and complex. Who have you seen him admire? Who have you seen him admire who deserves admiration? I was sort of thinking that it's often, you know, people who are not necessarily, you know, kind of world figures. You know, somebody who has actually even done something, you know, unspeakably good for people. Somebody who's been really brave. You know, he's often, you know, kind of put himself out there for, you know, some of the hostages, not just to get accolades for bringing them back.

41:00Fiona Hill:You know, there have been times when he's done something that, you know, won't necessarily, you know, give him popular acclaim all the time. And look, there are a couple of issues that, you know, I think he has to be given some credit for. He's not the kind of person who wants to preside over mass slaughter, even though it might look like it at times when we see what's happening currently in the country. But he is appalled by what the Iranians are doing. He's appalled by what Putin's doing. He was appalled by what Assad did, and he wanted to do something, you know, kind of about it. He's not somebody, you know, who, you know, wants to have the charnel houses, you know, filled with mountains of skulls.

41:38Fiona Hill:That's not him. The other thing is that he genuinely wants to see an end to the risk of nuclear war, nuclear Armageddon, just as Biden did. I mean, they're the same age group. He's been, you know, pretty consistent on this. He really did want to finish off the efforts that were started in the 1980s. And this is what's ironic at the moment, because, of course, we're in a bit of a pickle because the New START treaty has now lapsed. But he really did want to have those big arms control, arms negotiation talks, not just with Russia as the former Soviet Union, but also with China, with Iran, with North Korea.

42:13Fiona Hill:He does actually want to make the world a safer place from a nuclear perspective. And I feel that's the tragedy because, you know, he perhaps could have done something to that if he'd been more disciplined and more focused and less worried about whether he was going to get all kinds of accolades for it. That was what he was trying to do in Helsinki, you know, back before that disastrous press conference and his first proper meeting with Putin. And he's, I mean, I think it's a genuine sentiment on his part. So that does decartoonify things. So you can give them that. Absolutely. Look, and you still get lots of people saying, look, he's warm, he's charismatic.

42:48Fiona Hill:You know, I've seen flashes of that. But, you know, that's not sufficient in my view to normalize a person who is doing an enormous amount of damage. And the other thing is that just like Putin, he's a pattern breaker, but he's even more of a pattern breaker than Putin, which actually means, you know, he does obviously see all of the problems that we're facing. He's identified them all, I think, extremely well. he's broken the pattern but he's just not somebody who beyond real estate is actually really building something and because his tendency is towards dividing everyone and conquering them again like Putin he's not bringing people together to do things which you know perhaps perhaps he could have done so I think it's almost Shakespearean for me as that you know you have the hero the person who's the hero in their own telling of the tale but their own flaws prevent them from doing the things that they actually think that they want to do and for actually addressing the issues that they have correctly identified as being the key ones.

43:45Yeah. It's part of his self-image. He would like to be a peacemaker if it just didn't require so much reading.

43:51Fiona Hill:Yeah, well, it requires patience and some strategic thinking. It requires working with others and not short-circuiting the process, which is what he often does and declares peace, you know, when it hasn't actually happened, which then enables, you know, the people like Putin and others to come back around again, you know, and take advantage of the situation. That seems to be what's happening in Iran, as you and I speak. He made a promise he didn't mean to keep. The promise became embarrassing. So he declared that the killing had stopped when it obviously had not stopped. Right. I mean, look, and we can list all the different places where that has particularly happened.

44:23Fiona Hill:I mean, we all know that, you know, creating and building peace is very difficult. It's what we call it building. And, you know, it's not the same as building a wonderful tower or a kind of a real estate portfolio. There's so many other elements of it. And again, Trump's view, getting back to where we started from, is dealing with just a group of guys and then thinking that everything gets done from that direction. I think he does believe that Rome can be built in a day. Last topic area, and then I'll let you go, thanks for your generosity with your time. Nothing lasts forever. And while Trump speaks of wanting a third term, that will be difficult, even assuming his health permits, which is another question mark.

45:03In whatever a post-Trump world means, it's pretty clear Russia's put some deep grip on the American political right. Trump's next in line is even more anti-Ukraine than Trump himself. And there are all kinds of influencers and others in the Trump orbit or the pro-Trump world who have received all kinds of benefits from the Russians. And their propaganda messages do seem to shape a lot of the dialogue on the right-hand side of the spectrum. Do you think that outlasts Trump? Is that a phenomenon of Trump's special affinity for Russia? Or have they discovered some technology to influencing right-of-center parties in the United States and Europe?

45:40Fiona Hill:Well, it's definitely the feature of technology. I think that's absolutely right in just all the constant innovations that we have in technology that make it much easier to propagate information and to get the same ideas seeded on larger and larger groups of people than they could have done previously. But in terms of the form of this, we could have said the same about the American and the European left during the Soviet period. We could and we did. We did. There you go, right? And we did because it was true. It was true, exactly. And the thing is, but what was going on there was there were, in many respects, they were, as was termed at the time, fellow travellers.

46:17Fiona Hill:Sometimes they intersected, but they were all developing their ideas in parallel. And what really was useful to the Soviets at the time was, that all of these groups are thinking the same way. And that's, I think, what we're seeing again now. We've moved around to the views of the right are now in parallel with the views of Russia and of other states. And I think it just makes it easy. They become fellow travellers. And sometimes they get on not just on the same bus, but right in the seat next to each other. And of course, that did not completely fade away because you still see the ties that come out of the old French Communist Party and Italy, for example.

46:53Fiona Hill:and in Eastern Germany that still bond with Russia on the left, even though Russia is very much over here on the right, although we all talk about that horseshoe in which the politics have bent around. So it's not, I think, self-evident that this will continue post-Trump, but it will certainly, I think it's now shaped very much these politics of the future. And the real challenge will be how to find a way back again to some central or other definition of our politics in which this trend is neutralized, just as is what happened over time in Europe and in America on the left. And this phenomenon seems to be as advanced, if not even more so, in Europe and England than it is here.

47:43Fiona Hill:Well, I don't think it's more advanced than here, but I think that the United States is playing a role in advancing that. In advancing these kinds of pro-Russian, far-right authoritarian. People like Nigel Farage and others have had to kind of repudiate their links with Russia in the current European environment. But Farage and GB News, of course, have just joined at the hip with Truth Social. Farage is very much driven by his relationship with Trump. And so it's been quite difficult. You've had the head of reform from Wales in jail from actually accepting money from the Russians. Reform is the new right of center party that is overtaking the conservatives in support in the United Kingdom.

48:21Fiona Hill:The UK independence party successor with Nigel Farage at the top, you know, shifting from pushing for Brexit for the UK's removal from the European Union, now using immigration. And now they're trying to also pick up the same sets of issues that has been shaped here in the United States rather than in Russia per se. But, you know, we've seen funding from Russians. We're now seeing, you know, quite a lot of efforts from the United States. And, you know, ironically, it's both the US and Russia that are shaping a lot of the thinking of these right-wing movements and parties, as you said, in the UK and in Europe.

48:58Fiona Hill:At the same time, you're getting quite a lot of popular and political revulsion to not just what Russia is doing in Ukraine, but what the United States is doing with Greenland, et cetera. So I think this is going to be pretty messy. Last question, then I'll let you go. The Tsarist regime looked enormously strong until it unexpectedly collapsed. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union looked terrifyingly strong until it abruptly collapsed. Do you see any possibility of a similar kind of collapse of Putinist power? Sure. I mean, you know, we're only, you know, one step away from all kinds of uncertainty with his health as well.

49:31Fiona Hill:And as Bill Burns said some time ago, former head of the CIA, unfortunately, he seems extremely healthy. You know, he's had his health scares like, you know, most of us do. You know, but he's in his 70s now. He's heading towards his mid-70s. He was born in October 1952. So he's not quite 75 yet. But this year, he's 74. You don't know how long people are going to continue with all of their faculty. I mean, Trump, of course, turns 80 this year. So anything where Putin looks like he might be losing his grip, any singular disaster within the Russian economy or something else that is a major setback.

50:06Fiona Hill:I mean, look how fragile things appeared to be when Yevgeny Prigozhin started his march on Moscow. We don't know what could trigger things off. It's all about events. There is a great deal of uncertainty here in this current geopolitical climate, as you've already laid out. And, you know, the economy isn't doing as well as it is. You know, what if the Europeans suddenly get a backbone and a spine? What if there's a change of heart or a change of government here in the United States? What if President Xi of China suddenly starts to feel that maybe this close association with Russia is not benefiting in the way that they thought?

50:41Fiona Hill:They might need to nudge Putin and Russia in a different direction. I think it's going to be very hard for Putin to contemplate peace for all of the reasons we talked about before. He's purely now a wartime president. He came into office against the backdrop of the war in Chechnya in 2000 as a wartime president. It's been the hallmark of his presidency for 25 years. He could have done something different, but there's still, you know, kind of all of that risk because he's chosen war over peace that things could go wrong. Fiona Hill, thank you so much for your insights and for your service. Thank you so much, David.

51:13Fiona Hill:Great to be with you.

51:30Fiona Hill:a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Worzel, onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait.

52:09On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. is thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

52:42Thanks so much to Fiona Hill for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a travelogue by the great novelist and essayist V.S. Naipaul. The book is Among the Believers, published in 1981. is V.S. Naipaul's account of journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia in the years 1979 and 1980, that is, in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution that has now misgoverned Iran and has come to such bloody spasms in the days and weeks just past. Naipaul wanted to understand how it was that a country that's seemingly on its way to modernization, as Iran had been in the 1970s.

53:24Iran, under the Shah Ratsa Pahlavi, had been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. How a country seemingly fast-forwarding toward modernization could have taken the giant step backward that it took with the Iranian revolution. He interviewed people in the city of Qom, which is the center of the Ayatollah Khomeini's, the first supreme leader of Iran's religious power. And he interviewed everyday ordinary people as well. There's no big moment of reveal in these encounters. They're very everyday. They're very perceptive. He is a brilliant novelist and who can make a character come to life with a few strokes of a pen.

54:01But he did have one guiding insight that he repeats a couple of times in the course of his visit to Iran in 1979, 80, and this travelogue in 1981. And it's really worth thinking about today as we try to understand how the Iranian revolution of 1979-80 went so disastrously wrong in every way with the people of Iran. Naifal's observation was that the new religious leadership of Iran, although they took a step backward in terms of human rights, women's rights, human autonomy, they did not want to give up the good things, the tools of power. I shouldn't say the good things. They were prepared to get rid of music.

54:38But they didn't want to give up the instrumentalities of wealth and power of the modern world. They didn't want to stop the oil from being pumped by modern oil pumping technology. They didn't want to give up buying weapons and surveillance technology. They wanted all of those things. And he was baffled as to how people who turned their back on the culture and civilization that could produce these good things still wanted and still believe they could wield these instrumentalities. And he discusses this at two or three points in the course of the book. And let me quote just a couple of them here as guides to Naipaul's thinking.

55:12One of the things about Naipaul's career as a writer, I should say, was he was a famously kind of dyspeptic and even misanthropic person without any kind of regard for the niceties of human existence. I made him a very difficult person to be around. And those people who knew him have all kinds of harsh stories about how difficult it could be to know him. But it also meant that he was utterly free from from can't and euphemism in a way that will maybe seem a little startling in the world of 2026 when can't euphemism surround us so often he described the affinity of the revolutionary groups in iran for these western technologies um he he says he says and i'm quoting the beginning of a sentence here western technology that that's not in the quote western and here the tech quote begins technology surrounded us in tehran and some of it had been so islamized or put to such good islamic use, then its foreign origin seemed of no account.

56:06The hotel taxi driver could be helped through the evening traffic jams by the Quranic readings on his car radio. And when we got back to the hotel, there would be mullahs on television. Certain modern goods and tools, cars, radios, television, were necessary. Their possession was part of a proper Islamic pride. But these things were considered neutral. They were not associated with any particular faith or civilization. They were thought of as the stock of some great universal bazaar. And as he gets to the end of his trip, he returns to this observation, and this time he turns it into kind of the conclusion or the thesis of his whole section of the book.

56:43I won't discuss the parts on the other countries, but the whole section of his book on Iran under the Ayatollahs. He describes the Ayatollah Khomeini, the maker of the revolution, as self-perceiving himself as an interpreter, and this is the quote begins, interpreter of God's will, a leader of the faithful. He expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith. The confusion of a people of high medieval culture, awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of great encircling civilization. That civilization couldn't be mastered.

57:18It was to be rejected. At the same time, it was to be depended upon. now in the years since 1981 it's become apparent that these tools of technological power can be developed by societies that reject western ideals of freedom and individuality china is for all practical purposes a technological peer of the western world without absorbing or preserving many of these western ideals of individuality and freedom and autonomy so it can be done but But in the core of the Islamic world, and especially in Iran, it was not done. And Naipaul had challenges to think, why not? Why couldn't the Islamic Republic achieve what China achieved?

58:02Some kind of self-sustaining capacity to run a modern state in an effective way. They had the oil. They had the money. Yes, they had extreme plans of aggression. They poured hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of wealth into building the kind of empire of aggression aimed at Israel, but also at other states in the region. They built an empire that reached at one point all the way to the Mediterranean, all the way to Afghanistan, and they paid a lot of money for that. But they were never able to develop, despite the extraordinary skills of Iranian hackers that we see in Iranian computer culture, any kind of properly functioning technological economic system.

58:41Something went terribly wrong, and that has been the trigger for this revolution. because for Iran, maybe unlike China, that encircling world, you're either in it or you're not in it. And one of the messages of the tumults we have seen in Iran is that people, even people who maybe reject some of the values of the Western world, they want its benefits. That project of getting the benefits of Western civilization without its freedom and rights, that's one that has vexed tyrants all over the world. Some of them have somewhat succeeded, like the Chinese, the Iranians, like the Russians, have failed.

59:14and that failure is having enormous political consequences. And all of us who watch these horrible events in Iran from afar have to wish this brave and courageous people every success on their way to rediscovering, reclaiming what should be theirs. And we who have watched this also have to deal with the feelings of terrible shame that the United States made such promises to them through the mouth of its president, promises that at least as I record have not been honored and that have led many to tragic and perhaps unnecessary and avoidable deaths. Thank you so much for watching The David Fromm Show this week.

59:52As ever, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will consider doing that. I hope you will consider following me on social media, especially Instagram, X Twitter. At both places, I'm at David Fromm. I will see you and talk to you next week on The David Fromm Show. Thanks so much for listening and for watching. Bye-bye.

1:00:35This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.

1:00:56Fiona Hill:Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens, and what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.