Fiona Hill on What Putin Tells Us About Trump

0:06Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Great to be back with you, Susan and Jane. Great to see you, Evan. So happy to be with you guys.

0:31Well, it's officially summer and Washington has totally cleared out. And we figured now would be a good time to take a step back and to try to examine how our town looks right now under Trump 2.0, what he hath wrought. For the next several weeks, Susan and Jane and I are going to take turns sitting down with a special guest to help us unpack the first six months of Trump's second term in office. And there are a handful of central themes that we're going to be looking at in this series, including Trump's attempts to circumvent the law and what it means for you. We'll also analyze his relationship with some of the tycoons in Silicon Valley right here at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence.

1:17But today we wanted to look at Trump's foreign policy, what an unleashed Trump means for the country and for the world. Susan, for this conversation, you chose to sit down with someone that you've known a long time, someone we both know, Fiona Hill. Tell us a little bit about why Fiona. I thought she was a perfect person to sort of get us started. First of all, she's someone I've had a running conversation with really for the last, shockingly enough, 25 years we figured it out. It's a long time. And I think the course of that conversation in many ways is the subject of our podcast week in and week out.

1:55And that is what's happened to the U.S. Many people remember Fiona for the painful moment that she came to national attention as a star witness in the first impeachment hearings of Donald Trump because she had served as his very nonpartisan senior director for Russia and Europe at the National Security Council during his first term. She's worked at the National Intelligence Council. She's been a longtime scholar at Brookings Institution. She later wrote a bestselling book about all this called There's Nothing For You Here, Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, connecting the dots between foreign policy in her book and her own upbringing in the kind of deindustrialized heartland of Great Britain.

2:41When Fiona and I first knew each other, she was a young Russia expert. I was a young foreign correspondent for The Washington Post headed to Russia at the very beginning of Vladimir Putin's presidency. And at that time, our conversation was about the world. It was about, you know, what is this the fragile state of Russian democracy under Vladimir Putin as it was under attack? And here we are a quarter century later, and we're still talking, of course, about the horrific consequences of Putin's long run in power. There's no democracy to speak of there. And it's America's democracy, I think, that is increasingly the focus of our concern and the concern of anyone who's thinking about not just what happens inside the U.S., but in the world writ large.

3:29And so I felt like to bridge that, to make the connection between what's happening in the world and the playbook of authoritarianism that we're seeing carried out right here. You know, I thought it was a really important and timely conversation. But, you know, I'm curious what you guys were hoping for us to get out of it. You know, Susan, I can't wait to hear this conversation because what's going on is so confusing and indecipherable in terms of the relationship between Trump and Putin.

3:59Fiona Hill:Just in this last few days, we're first shipping weapons to Ukraine, then suddenly stopping the shipments of weapons to Ukraine, then restarting the shipments to Ukraine, with Trump going from, for years, seeming to be, you know, sending valentines to Putin, to then now using profanity to describe how Putin is screwing them over. It is the strangest, most indecipherable and important dynamic. I just really look forward to trying to get two people who understand the world as well as you and Fiona Hill. Both of you are also such truth tellers. I think of Fiona Hill as someone who just pulls no punches, tells it straight.

4:50Fiona Hill:Same with you. I can't wait for this conversation. I think there's also something really specific that Fiona Hill brings to this, which is that, as you mentioned, Susan, she comes from an old coal mining town in England. And one of the things she did in her book so well was that she was able to explain in some ways the political dynamics that drove Brexit were some of the same political dynamics that produced Trump in our own politics. And because she's an outsider, she's a really keen observer of the ecology of power, not only in Washington, but also in the country. She has a way of seeing some of the absurdities and also the real underlying truths of Washington.

5:29And I'm thrilled that you guys are in conversation. You know, I will I will talk to Fiona any day and any time because I've learned so much from this ongoing discussion we've been having. And so without further ado, here is this conversation with Fiona Hill.

5:52So Fiona, I've gone back and looked. I have an exact date. When you and I began this long-running conversation of ours, and it was October 26, 2000, the Stanley Foundation Conference on Russia. You're nodding your head. You remember this too. I do remember it, yes. We began talking about Russia and the fate and the prospects for its then very fragile democracy at the very beginning of Vladimir Putin's very, very long run in power, which I would say none of us really anticipated. But here we are a quarter century later. And when we talk now, it's not just about Russia anymore, but about America's institutions and the West's institutions being uncertain at best in this time.

6:37Fiona Hill:Yes, we first met at really the beginning of his presidency, the rather unexpected presidency, let alone the unexpected longevity of it. Nobody anticipated that Vladimir Putin would replace Boris Yeltsin. In fact, I'm sure that if anybody had suggested something like that earlier on in the 1990s, they would have been incredulous. But, you know, indeed, here we are. And it's also remarkable to think that he has lasted so long, now presiding over a wartime presidency after his fateful decision to invade Ukraine. But he also actually started off as wartime president. That's probably one of the things we were talking about 25 years ago, because his ascendancy to the presidency coincides with the reopening of a war, a domestic war, by Moscow against Chechnya, its breakaway province in the North Caucasus.

7:27Fiona Hill:And at that point, that was the largest military conflict in Russia and by extension in Europe since World War II. In a way, Putin has been a product of war and continues as the product of war today, 25 years later. You know, it's interesting. I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's one thing that both of us have stressed ever since Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This idea that someone who came to power through war, who has associated it with all of the key moments in many ways of his presidency and the wishful thinking in the West that that has occasioned. I was just looking back, in fact, at some of Putin's early absolute flat refusals to listen to any proposals by the then Clinton administration, Bill Clinton administration in the United States, urging him to seek a negotiated settlement in Chechnya.

8:23And so through lines are really important. A few months into Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, you and I had a conversation, one of many that we've had. and we were sort of wondering out loud, well, what if this is the bigger war, the bigger confrontation between Russia and the West that Putin always talks about it? Are you at war with somebody if they're at war with you, even if you don't want to be? And I remember some of the pushback at the time, this idea that we were being almost hysterical even for bringing it up. Three years on, I'm curious how you assess it now.

9:03Fiona Hill:Yes, I mean, I think what we were trying to do at that time was just make an analytical observation, and we got a lot of pushback. And really what we were basically observing was this confluence of conflict and the fact that the system of deterrence and the system of international relations for broader global security system and regional security system in Europe had just broken down. And as a result of that, there was no restraint or constraint built in that could actually head conflict off. And the fact that you have so many different players with so many different goals that start to act in concert is obviously extraordinarily dangerous.

9:41Fiona Hill:If you look back to Chechnya as well, the Russians under Boris Yeltsin started off with a whole host of agreements with different regions of the conflict. when Putin came in at the end of the 1990s, there had been actually an effort to resolve Chechnya with basically a settlement that would basically lead to a referendum in the future for Chechnya to decide whether it wanted to remain with Russia or not. Putin just basically broke that off, repudiated it right away. That becomes a kind of a pattern. Every time we see some kind of conflict, we don't see anything beyond a temporary ceasefire or a temporary truce that leads to anything particularly positive because there isn't anyone to guarantee it.

10:23Fiona Hill:And that's, I think, what we were trying to grasp at three years ago. And we have China obviously offering all kinds of material, moral and political support and security support to Russia. And of course, we've had Iran, which provided Russia with all kinds of material support. But of course, now we have the conflict between Israel and Iran and the United States. There's launch of an attack on Iran as well. And Russia hasn't come to Iran's aid. So I suppose people watching that would say, well, you know, there you go. That hasn't quite panned out in a kind of World War I or World War II fashion.

10:55Fiona Hill:But what we're actually seeing is just a multiplicity of conflict and no real firm resolution for any of these in store. And all the precedents leading up to this not boding well at all for us getting ourselves out of this predicament. Well, that's right. This institutional weakness, in effect, that you're talking about, there's no fixed global order that is functioning now to prevent conflict, especially if a great power is entering into it. With our kind of Putinologist hats on for a second here, do you think Putin's goal is really around kind of restoring what he can of the former empire? Or is it about shifting the balance of power with some global West?

11:36Is it a more ideological conflict with the West that we're seeing?

11:39Fiona Hill:It can be all of those things because, yes, Putin has declared war on the West. He's constantly talking about it, even going back a decade or so, when Russia annexed Crimea and made his big speech annexing Crimea. There was all the hallmarks there of a kind of a war with the West, trying to roll back what he saw as the Western incursions by all kinds of different ways into what Russia sees as its space in Eastern Europe. He's just said this quite recently in some other formulation of this, where Russian soldiers' feet touch the ground that belongs to Russia. And he sees that stretching back over the centuries.

12:15Fiona Hill:It's what he said when the annexed Crimea, basically picking up from the fact that it had been annexed by Catherine the Great previously. So he always sees this kind of historical validation of everything that he's doing now. But actually, he doesn't want a full-scale war either. So there's a contradiction. What he's trying to do all the time is something that falls far short of a major military confrontation, but there is a willingness to do all kinds of other things that fit into that sense of confrontation and conflict. everything from attacking critical national infrastructure, cyber attacks, influence operations, you know, what everybody likes to call hybrid war.

12:55Fiona Hill:There's things that are in the gray zone that leave all kinds of ambiguity and plausible deniability of kind of attacks that have happened, although sometimes it's implausible deniability because we could prove they did it. So this actually makes things extraordinarily difficult to deal with, to be frank. Yeah, Putin needs this grievance against the West because it's fueled him from the very beginning of his rise as president, which was not only about war in Chechnya, but also this sense that Russia had been weakened, that Russia, in effect, had somehow been kept down by the victorious West after the end of the Cold War.

13:30And Putin, remember, was sort of the make Russia great again analog in some ways. That grievance, he'll never let go of, right? There'll never be a moment where Russia is fully made great again under Putin because he requires this kind of external enemy. It's just core to his political persona.

13:49Fiona Hill:What he's looking for is absolute security, which none of us ever get. And that's at the whole core of the way that Russians and Putin in particular think about this. You know, the Russian word for security is безопасness, which means without danger. And we'll never have a world without danger. And Putin likes to take calculated risks, but he always looks at what could hurt him out there. That's why you have all these debates about NATO and about everything else that basically confuses and confounds the debate about all of this in Europe and elsewhere. Because Putin doesn't really care about intent and about whether at a particular point someone doesn't intend to actually use the capability that he has or might have.

14:28Fiona Hill:He always looks at capability, the capacity for harm to be done. anything that can array against Russia with a preponderance of power or to be able to challenge Russia's ability to exert itself. I mean, that's why, frankly, he sees NATO as a threat. It's not that he thinks that NATO is going to attack him anytime soon, but it just actually prevents him from doing what he wants to do and is actually attacking a neighbour, a weaker neighbour. It prevents Russia from being the dominant player in Europe, which, of course, if NATO disappeared as collective defence, the United States pulled out, Russia would be the dominant military power in Europe.

15:03Fiona Hill:Although, again, I mean, Ukraine shows that it is actually possible to defend yourself and to at least repel Russia and fend them off for a period of time. You know, listening to you talk about Russian imperialism almost as the birth rate that Putin claims for himself and the entire Russian military, I would say looking back on if I had another shot at our 2005 book, Kremlin Rising on Putin, that's the piece that I felt wasn't as clear then as it is today is this sense of historical imperial mission that Putin has imbued his presidency with, whether you buy it or not, or just find it to be, you know, kind of a bogus rationale.

15:45Certainly, his willingness to deploy force outside of the boundaries of Russia itself is something that wasn't fully apparent to me when we began our conversation many years ago. Now, you wrote a terrific book as well about Putin. Mr. Putin, I'm wondering, what's the piece that you most wish to have accented more, to put more in from the vantage point of 2025?

16:05Fiona Hill:I think it's really making it clearer that there is a bit of a turning point for Putin and Russia. Everybody points to the Munich speech in 2007, February 2007, when Putin sounds much more aggressive than he did before. And we did, Clifford Gaddy and I, in that book, Mr. Putin, Operative in the Kremlin, And we did scope out, you know, why Putin felt bold enough to make such an aggressive speech. It's because Russia was no longer a supplicant to the West. It had paid off all of its debts. And I mean, there's a lesson for all of us in there, because Putin tried to look at every vulnerability that Russia had.

16:46Fiona Hill:Why had Russia been sidelined in the 1990s? Why did the Soviet Union collapse? It was because the state was no longer resilient. It didn't have the resources. it kind of bankrupts itself and overextended. It takes some time for Russia to get back on its feet again. That's why he was so focused on the domestic. And look, he could very easily have been ousted at any point, right? I mean, it wasn't clear that he would stay, you know, for so long in power. And there was that whole strange switcheroo that he did with Dmitry Medvedev, where he wanted to maintain the legitimacy of the presidency and didn't want to extend his time in office.

17:22Fiona Hill:But then, of course, he comes back again for another indefinite set of terms in 2011 and 2012. And then that up-swallowed grievances really helped to propel him and others forward because, I mean, he's acting in the name of others as well. And that's why, you know, previously, he probably hadn't legitimized himself so much with that kind of historical mantle that he's always putting on of all the previous czars. And he was sort of trying to straddle the kind of late Soviet period and some of the old Soviet heroes, but dealing with their repudiation. I mean, now he's gone, you know, beyond the czarist mythology and he's reinstating Stalin, allowing Stalin to be reinstated.

18:03Fiona Hill:He's embraced the idea that Russia today is the inheritor, the successor state to the Soviet Union and to the Russian Empire. And he's trying to kind of put all of that back again, but he didn't really have the capacity for that before. I think all of us would argue that Russia was doing better economically than it's ever done before in its history under Putin. notwithstanding all of the shocks to the global economic system, but because of the clever and careful stewarding of Russia's oil and gas resources, paying off the debts, being very careful about the macroeconomic stability of Russia, setting up sovereign wealth funds, basically rainy day funds, putting back the capacity of the emergency stores, the armaments and different supplies to be used in emergency situations.

18:48Fiona Hill:He spent a lot of time thinking about all of that. And that's why he's so suspicious of whether other people have the intention to use these capacities or not, because he decides to do so. But also, after 25 years, of course, he's worried about how long he's got. And it's regime survival and his own survival, because, I mean, in the larger annals of current politics, he's relatively young still, right? He's 72, he'll be 73 this year. He's way younger than President Trump and President Biden was, and many U.S. senators and, you know, a few other leaders globally, although actually the trend is to much younger people in other parts of the world.

19:23And he's got to start worrying at this point about, you know, where does this all end?

19:28Fiona Hill:So it gives him even more of an incentive to double and triple down. He still has the chance to break Stalin's record to be the longest-serving modern leader of Russia. He already is the longest-serving leader of Russia since Stalin. But I think to your point about resurrecting Stalin, what you and I are both responding to right now, people may not be aware, they literally have put back a statue of Stalin in Moscow's metro. Obviously, it's one of those kind of symbolic thresholds that's been crossed. And it reinforces, for me, the extent to which over the last quarter century, the unthinkable, unfortunately, in Russia has come to pass.

20:09And many unthinkables at that time of our first conversation have come to pass. So we'll talk about a little bit more about what's been unthinkable and yet has come to pass in Washington and the West when we come back after a break. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.

20:32Stay tuned to The Political Scene podcast as we continue our summer interview series. Next week, Jane sits down with Leah Littman, co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, to discuss whether the Supreme Court can save the country from Donald Trump. And don't forget to check for more updates from our colleagues David Remnick and Tyler Foggett throughout the week.

20:54Fiona Hill:Hey, listeners. This is Liz Mainz-Amanzadi, the New Yorker's Puzzles and Games editor. If you're someone who likes making lists and organizing your bookshelf, we think you'll love Catalogs, our new daily game that challenges you to put things in order based on a hidden rule. You might be asked to sort peppers by spiciness, world capitals by population, or Martin Scorsese movies by release date. You can play Catalogs every day at newyorker.com slash games and in the New Yorker app for iOS or Android. Here's a helpful hint. The app gives you free access to our entire archive of catalogs, along with our word scramble game Shuffalo and the mini crossword.

21:33So download the New Yorker app for new games to play every day.

21:44Okay, so Fiona, speaking of the unthinkable and Washington, the conversation that for me really stuck out in recent years was a phone call you and I had on the eve of January 6, 2021, in which we were talking to each other and expressing our worries that, just like in our experience with Russia, that maybe people in Washington weren't taking Donald Trump and those surrounding him enough at their word. And I recall us both being extremely concerned that Trump's continued pressing of false claims about the quote-unquote rigged election in 2020 were actually going to lead to violence at the U.S. Capitol the next day, which it did.

22:26Do you remember that call? I do.

22:29Fiona Hill:I mean, very much so. And in fact, then we called each other back as it was unfolding, saying, oh my God, are you watching this? Because both of us were also working on other books and trying to think about these issues in that context. And it certainly shifted a lot of my thinking when that actually happened. Because it's one thing to talk about something in a theoretical manner and then to actually see it unfold. You know, in many respects, a lot of our fears and all the things that we saw happening in the Russian context, and I later described in the course of the other book that I wrote, that Russia was the ghost of Christmas future for the United States.