Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump
嘉宾：Fiona Hill
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We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well.
We've got to understand how the guy thinks
and why he thinks like he does.
He has got his own context and his own frame
and his own rationale.
And he is rational.
He is a rational actor in his own context.
We've got to understand that.
We've got to understand that he would take offense
at something and he would take action over something.
It doesn't mean to say that we are necessary to blame
by taking actions, but we are to blame
when we don't understand the consequences
of things that we do and act accordingly
or take preventative action or recognize
that something might happen as a result of something.
- What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine
with a tactical nuclear weapon?
The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill,
a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert
specializing in Russia.
She has served the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations,
including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump.
She has made it to the White House from Humble Beginnings
in the North of England, a story she tells in her book,
"There's Nothing for You Here."
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill.
You came from Humble Beginning in a coal mining town
in Northeast England.
So what were some formative moments in your young life
that made you the woman you are today?
- I was born in 1965 and it was the period
where the whole coal sector in Britain
was in decline already.
And basically, my father, by the time I came along,
had lost his job multiple times.
Every coal mine he worked in was closing down.
He was looking constantly for other work
and he had no qualifications because at age 14,
he'd gone down the mines.
His father had gone down the mines at 13.
His great-grandfather around the same kind of age.
I mean, you had a lot of people at different points
going down coal mines at 12, 13, 14.
They didn't get educated beyond that period
because the expectation was,
"Hey, you're gonna go down the mine
like everybody else in your family."
And then he didn't really have any other qualifications
to basically find another job
beyond something in manual labor.
So he worked in a steelworks.
That didn't work out.
A brickworks, that closed down.
And then he went to work in the local hospital,
part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom
as a porter, an orderly.
So basically, somebody's just pushing people around.
There was no opportunity to retrain.
So the big issue in my family was education.
You've gotta have one.
You've gotta have some qualifications.
The world is changing.
It's changing really quickly.
And for you to kind of keep up with it,
you're gonna have to get educated
and find a way out of this.
And very early on, my father had basically said to me,
"There's nothing for you here.
You're gonna have to, if you want to get ahead."
And he didn't have any kind of idea
that as a girl, I wouldn't.
I mean, actually, in many respects,
I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy.
There was no expectation that I would go into industry.
There was some kind of idea that maybe
if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse.
My mother was a midwife.
And so she'd, at age 16, left school
and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife.
I had other relatives who'd gone to teach in local schools.
And so there was an idea that women could get educated
and there was a kind of a range of things that you could do.
But the expectation then was,
go out there, do something with your life,
but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave.
So all of that was circling around me,
particularly in my teenage years,
as I was trying to find my way through life
and looking forward.
- First of all, what does that even look like,
getting educated, given the context of that place?
You don't know.
There's a whole world of mystery out there.
So how do you figure out what to actually do out there?
But was there moments, formative moments,
either challenging or just inspiring,
where you wondered about what you want to be,
where you want to go?
- Yeah, there were a number of things.
I mean, I think like a lot of kids,
you talk to people,
and particularly from blue collar backgrounds,
said, "What did you want to do?"
Boys might say, "I wanted to be a fireman."
Or you got kind of...
At one point, when I was a little girl,
I wanted to be a nurse.
I had a little nurse's uniform like my mother.
I didn't really know what that meant,
but I used to go around pretending to be a nurse.
I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy,
and I used to read this.
And that was one of the formative ideas.
We also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area,
and I'd be out in the fields all the time,
and I'd watch farmers with their animals,
and I'd see vets coming along
and watching people deal with the livestock.
And there was a kind of a famous story at the time
about a vet called James Herriot.
It became here in the United States as well,
and was a sort of a TV miniseries.
He'd written a book, and he was the vet
for one of my great aunt's dogs.
And people were always talking about him,
and I thought, "Oh, I could be a vet."
And then one day I saw one of the local vets
with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field,
and he'd got his hand stuck, and the cow was kicking him.
And I thought, "Yeah, maybe not, actually.
No, I don't think I want to be a vet."
So I cycled through all of these things about,
okay, I could get an education,
but the whole sense was you had to apply your education.
It wasn't an education for education's sake.
It was an education to do something.
And when I was about 14 or 15,
my local member of parliament came to the school,
and it was one of these pep talks
for kids in these deprived areas.
He had been quite prominent in local education,
and now he was a member of parliament.
He himself had come from a really hard-scrabble background,
and had risen up through education.
He'd even gone to Oxford
and done philosophy, politics, and economics.
And he basically told my class,
even though it was highly unlikely
any of us were really going to get ahead
and go to elite institutions,
"Look, you can get an education.
You don't have to be held back by your circumstances.
But if you do get an education, it's a privilege,
and you need to do something with it."
So then I'm thinking, "Well, what could I do?"
Okay, an education's a qualification.
It's to do something.
Most people around me I knew didn't have careers.
I mean, my dad didn't really have a career.
He had jobs.
My mom thought of her nursing as a career, though,
and it genuinely was,
and she was out there trying to help women
survive childbirth.
My mother had these horrific stories,
basically over the dining room table,
that she'd stop, she'd leave out her nursing books.
And I tell you, if everyone had had my mom as a mother,
there'd be no reproduction on the planet.
It was just these grim, horrific stories
of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors
that my sister and I would just go,
"Oh my God, you know, what?
Please stop."
So I thought, "Well, you know,
I don't necessarily want to go in that direction."
But it was the timing that really cinched things for me.
I was very lucky that the region that I grew up,
County Durham, despite the massive decline,
deindustrialization, and the complete collapse
of the local government system around me,
still maintained money for education.
And they also paid for exchanges.
And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany,
in France, also in Russia, in Kostroma, near Yaroslavl,
for example, an old textile town,
similar down in its kind of region,
but quite historic in the Russian context.
In fact, the original birthplace
of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma,
just as County Durham was quite a distinguished,
historic area in the British context.
And so it was an idea that I could go on exchanges,
I could learn languages.
I studied German, I studied French.
And then in 1983, there was the war scare,
§02Transcript · 07:44–15:56
basically provoked by the Euro Missile Crisis.
So the stationing of new categories
of strategic nuclear weapons
and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe
and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War.
And this Euro Missile Crisis over SS-20
and Pershing missiles went on from 1977,
so when I was about 11 or 12,
all the way through into the later part of the 1980s.
And in 1983, we came extraordinarily close
to a nuclear conflict.
It was very much another rerun
of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
So 20 years on, same kind of thing.
The Soviets misread,
although I didn't know this at the time,
I know a lot of this after the fact,
but the tension was palpable.
But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions
of a series of exercises, Operation Able Archer,
that the United States was conducting
and actually thought that the United States
might be preparing for a first nuclear strike.
And that then set up a whole set
of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union.
Eventually, it was recognized that all of this
was really based on misperceptions.
And of course, that later led to negotiations
between Gorbachev and Reagan
for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces, the INF Treaty.
But in 1983, that tension was just acute.
And for us as a teenager,
we were basically being prepped the whole time
for the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon.
There were TV series, films in the United States
and the UK, threads the day after.
We had all these public service announcements
telling us to seek sanctuary or cover
in the inevitability of a nuclear blast.
And my house was so small,
they said, "Look for a room without a window."
There were no rooms without windows.
My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window
and said if there was a nuclear flash,
we'd have to get down on the floor, not look up,
but the curtains would help.
And we were like, "This is ridiculous, Dad."
And we would all try to see if we could squeeze
in the space under the stairs,
a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter.
I mean, it's all just totally nuts.
Or you had to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside.
And I thought, "Well, this isn't gonna work."
And one of my great uncles who had fought in World War II
said, "Well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona.
Why don't you go and study Russian?
Try to figure it out.
Figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up."
Because during the- - Go talk to them.
- Exactly, during World War II,
the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union
had all been wartime allies.
And my uncle Charlie thought,
"Well, there's something gone wrong here.
Maybe you can figure it out."
And as you said, "Go talk to them."
So I thought, "Okay, I'll study Russian."
So that's really how this came about.
I thought, "Well, it's applying education.
I'll just do my very best to understand
everything I possibly can about the Russian language
and the Soviet Union, and I'll see what I can do."
And I thought, "Well, maybe I could become a translator."
So I had visions of myself sitting around,
you know, listening to things in a big headset
and in a best way translating perhaps
at some future arms control summits.
- So how did the journey continue with learning Russian?
I mean, this early dream of being a translator
and thinking, "How can I actually help understand
or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict
that threatens the existence of the human species?"
How did it actually continue?
- Well, I mean, I read everything I possibly could
about nuclear weapons and nuclear war,
and I started to try to teach myself Russian a little bit.
- So it was always in context of nuclear war?
- It was very much in the context of nuclear war
at this particular point, but also in historical context,
because I knew that the United States
and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union
had been wartime allies in World War II,
so I tried to understand all of that.
And also, you know, like many other people,
I'd read Russian literature in translation.
I'd read "War and Peace," and I loved the book, actually.
I mean, particularly the story parts of it.
I wasn't one really at that time when I was a teenager.
I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, you know,
in terms of his series of "The Great Man"
and of history and, you know, kind of social change,
although now I appreciate it more.
But when I was about 14, I was like,
"This man needed an editor.
Could he have just gone on with the story?
What an amazing story, what an incredible,
you know, kind of book this is."
- I still think he needs an editor, but...
- Well, I think his wife tried, didn't she?
But he got quite upset with her.
And then I kind of thought to myself,
"Well, how do I study Russian?"
Because there were very few schools in my region,
you know, given the impoverishment of the region
where you could study Russian,
so I would have to take Russian from scratch.
And this is where things get really quite interesting,
because there were opportunities
to study Russian at universities,
but I would need to have, first of all,
an intensive Russian language course in the summer,
and I didn't have the money for that.
And the period is around the miners' strike
in the United Kingdom in 1984.
Now, the miners of County Durham
had very interestingly had exchanges and ties
with the miners of Donbass going back to the 1920s.
And as I studied Russian history,
I discovered there was lots of contacts
between Bolshevik, Soviet Union,
the early period after the Russian Revolution,
but even before that,
during the imperial period in Russia
between the Northern England and the Russian Empire
and the old industrial areas.
Basically, big industrial areas
like the Northeast of England and places like Donbass
were built up at the same time,
often by the same sets of industrialists.
And Donetsk in the Donbass region
used to be called Husevka,
because it was established by a Welsh industrialist
who brought in miners from Wales
to help kind of develop the coal mines there,
and also the steelworks and others
that we're hearing about all the time.
So I got very fascinated in all these linkages.
And famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union
like Yevgeny Zamyatin worked in the shipyards
in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
and there was just this whole set of connections.
And in 1984, when the miners' strike took place,
the miners of Donbass, along with other miners
from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley,
for example, in Germany, or miners in Poland,
sent money in solidarity to the miners of Kandy-Durham.
And there'd been these exchanges, as I said,
going back and forth since the 1920s,
formal exchanges between miners,
the regional miners' unions.
And I heard, again, from the same great-uncle
who had told me to study Russian,
that there were actually scholarships
for the children of miners,
and it could be former miners as well, for their education.
And I should go along to the miners' hall,
a place called Red Hills,
where the miners of Kandy-Durham
had actually pooled all of their resources
and built up their own parliament,
and their own place that they could talk among themselves
to figure out how to enhance the welfare
and wellbeing of their communities.
And they'd put money aside for education for miners.
There was all kinds of lecture series from the miners
and all kinds of other activities supporting soccer teams
and artistic circles and writing circles, for example.
People like George Orwell were involved
in some of these writers' circles
in other parts of Britain and mining communities, for example.
And so they told me I could go along
and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian.
So I show up, and it was the easiest application
I've ever come across.
They just asked me to, my dad came along with me.
They asked me to verify that my dad had been a miner,
and they looked up his employment record on little cards,
you know, kind of a little tray somewhere.
And then they asked me how much I needed
to basically pay for the travel
and some of the basic expenses for the study,
and they wrote me a cheque.
And so thanks to the miners of Donbass
and this money that was deposited
with the miners of Kandy-Durham
with the Durham Miners' Association,
I got the money to study Russian for the first time
before I embarked on my studies at university.
- As you're speaking now, it's reminding me
that there's a different way to look
§03Transcript · 15:58–23:47
both at history and at geography and at different places.
You know, this is an industrial region.
- That's right. - And it echoes,
and the experience of living there is more captured
not by Moscow or Kiev, but by, at least historically,
but by just being a mining town and industrial town.
- That's right, in the place itself.
- Yeah. - Yeah, I mean,
there are places in the United States,
in Appalachia, in West Virginia, and in Pennsylvania,
like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place.
And the northeast of England, you know,
was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.
It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley,
which has its own, I would say, contours and frames.
And when you come to those industrial areas,
your previous identities get submerged
in that larger framework.
I've always looked at the world through that lens
of being, you know, someone from the working class,
the blue-collar communities, from a very specific place
with lots of historical and economic connotations.
And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems
that the Donbassers experienced over the last 30 years.
That people came from all over the place to work there.
Of course, it was a population
that one might say is indigenous, you know,
might've gone back centuries there,
but they would have been, you know,
in the smaller rural farming communities,
just like it was the same in the northeast of England.
And people, in the case of the northeast of England,
came from Wales, they came from further
in the south of England, the Midlands,
they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland.
I have all of that heritage in my own personal background.
And you've got a different identity.
And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity
on you from the outside that things go awry.
And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen
in the case of Donbass.
It's a place that's a part in many respects,
historically, and in terms of its evolution
and development over time.
And, you know, particularly in the case of Russia,
the Russians have tried to say, "Well, look," you know,
because most people speak Russian there,
is the lingua franca.
I mean, in the northeast of England,
of course, everyone spoke English,
but lots of people were Irish speakers,
you know, Gaelic-Irish speakers,
or, you know, some of them might have
certainly been Welsh speakers.
There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh
as their first language who came there,
you know, but they created an identity.
It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster,
you know, the northern province of the, you know,
the whole of the Irish island,
you know, the part of Ireland
that is still part of the United Kingdom.
That was also a heavily industrialized area,
high manufacturing, mass manufacturing,
shipbuilding, for example.
People came from all over there, too,
which is why when Ireland got its independence
in the United Kingdom, Ulster, Belfast,
and that whole region, you know, kind of clung on
because it was, again, that melting pot.
It was kind of intertwined with the larger
industrial economy and had a very different identity.
And so that, you know, for me,
growing up in such a specific place
with such a special, in many respects, heritage
gave me a different perspective on things.
When I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987
to study there, I actually went to a translators' institute,
what was then called the Maurice Therese,
which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages.
I was immediately struck by how similar
everything was to the north of England
because it was just like one big working-class culture
that had sort of broken out onto the national stage.
Everything in northern England was nationalized.
We had British steel, British coal,
British rail, British shipbuilding,
because after World War II,
the private sector had been devastated
and the state had to step in.
And of course, the Soviet Union is one great big,
giant, nationalized economy when I get there.
And it's just, the people's attitudes
and outlooks are the same.
People didn't work for themselves.
They always worked for somebody else.
And it had quite a distortion on the way
that people looked at the world.
- Do you still speak Russian?
- I do, yeah.
- You speak Russian?
- Yeah, I can, of course, if you want.
- Well, then I need to say something
and everyone will think about what we're talking about.
- Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody.
You have an advantage on me
because it's your native language as well.
- For people wondering, the English speakers in the audience,
you're really missing a lot
from the few sentences we said there.
Yeah, it's a fascinating language
that stretches actually geographically
across a very large part of this world.
So there you are in 1987,
an exchange student in the Soviet Union.
What was that world like?
- Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period
because it's the period that's just around the time
of the peak of Perestroika,
Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president.
Well, he wasn't quite president at that point.
He was Secretary General of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union,
trying to transform the whole place.
So I arrived there in September of 1987,
just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty.
It was just within weeks of them about to sign that,
which really ends that whole period
that had shaped my entire teenage years
of the end of the Euromissile Crisis
by finally having agreement on basically the reduction
and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces.
And also at this point,
Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up.
So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel
in ways that we wouldn't have done before.
Not just in Moscow,
which is where I was studying at the translational institute,
but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia,
went all the way to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East,
all the way around Moscow.
And at this point, it was also the Kreseniya Rus',
which has become very important now.
This was the anniversary,
the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia,
which of course has become a massive obsession
of Vladimir Putin's, but you know, 988,
'cause I was there '87 to '88.
At this point, the Russian Orthodox Church
is undergoing a revival
from being repressed during the Soviet period.
You certainly have the church stepping out
as a non-governmental organization
and engaging in discussions with people
about the future of religion.
So that was something that I wasn't expecting to witness.
Also, I mean, being in Moscow,
this is the cultural capital of a vast empire at this point.
I'd never lived in a major city before.
It's the first big city I lived in.
I'd never been to the opera.
You know, the first time I got an opera,
it's at the Bolshoi, and I'd never seen a ballet.
I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture.
When you're kind of growing up in a mining region,
you know, there's very limited opportunities
for this kind of thing.
I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir.
My parents signed me up for absolutely everything,
you know, they possibly could education-wise,
but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this.
So, you know, I was kind of astounded
by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience
that one could have in Moscow.
But the main thing was I was really struck
by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs.
Because this was Moscow, you know,
I got this image about what it would look like.
I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first
about what I would see there,
if not the big nuclear superpower.
And as soon as I got there,
it was just this like as if a huge weight
that I'd been carrying around for years
in my teenage years just disappeared
because it's just ordinary people
in an ordinary place, not doing great.
This is the period of, you know,
what they call "deficitnei vremye,"
you know, so the period of deficits.
But there was no food in the shops.
There was, you know, very little in terms of commodities
because the supply and demand parts
of the economic equation were out of whack
because this was total central planning.
You know, you'd go into, you know,
a shop that was supposed to sell boots
and there'd be just one pair of boots
all in the same size and the same color.
I actually lucked out because once I was
§04Transcript · 23:48–32:12
in this Hungarian boot shop that was right next
to where my hall of residence was
and I was looking for a new pair of boots
and every single pair of boots in the shop were my size.
And they were all women's boots.
There were no men's boots at all, you know,
'cause there was been an oversupply of boots
and that size production.
But you could really kind of see here
that there was something wrong.
And, you know, in the north of England,
everything was closed down.
The shops were shuttered because there was no demand
because everybody lost their jobs.
It was massive employment.
You know, when I went off to university in 1984,
90% youth unemployment in the UK,
meaning that when kids left school,
they didn't have something else to go on to
unless they got to university
or vocational training or an apprenticeship.
And most people were still looking, you know,
kind of months out of leaving school.
And so shops were closing
'cause people didn't have any money.
You know, I had 50% male unemployment in some of the towns
as the steel works closed down
and the wagon works, the railways, for example, in my area.
But in Moscow, people in theory did have money,
but there was just, there was nothing to buy.
Those are the place was falling apart, literally.
I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street,
balconies fall off buildings,
you know, one accident after another.
And then there was, you know, this real kind of sense,
even though the vibrancy and excitement
and hope of the Gorbachev period,
a real sense of the Soviet Union had lost its way.
And of course it was only a year or so
after I left from that exchange program
and I'd already started with my degree program
in Soviet studies at Harvard,
that the Soviet Union basically unraveled.
And it really did unravel.
It wasn't like it collapsed.
It was basically that there was so many debates
that Gorbachev had sparked off
about how to reform the country,
how to put it on a different path,
that, you know, no one was in agreement.
And it was basically all these fights
and debates and disputes among the elites at the center,
as well as, you know, basically a loss of faith
in the system in the periphery
and among the general population
that in fact pulled it apart.
And of course, in 1991,
you get Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian Federation,
then a constituent part of the Soviet Union,
together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus,
all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union
getting together and agreeing and essentially ending it.
And Gorbachev, you know, so basically I'm there
at the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation
and thinking about the future.
And within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone
and it's on a different track entirely.
- Well, I wonder if we reran the 20th century a thousand times
if how many times the Soviet Union would collapse.
- Yeah, I wonder about that too.
And I also wonder about what would have happened
if it didn't collapse
and Gorbachev had found a different direction.
- I mean, you know, we see a very divisive time now
in American history.
The United States of America has very different cultures,
very different beliefs, ideologies within those states,
but that's kind of the strength of America
is there's these little laboratories of ideas.
- Until though, that they don't keep together.
I mean, I've had colleagues who have described
what's happening in the West right now
was a kind of soft secession with states, you know,
going off in their own direction.
- In which states?
- Well, these kinds of conceptions that we have now,
divisions between red and blue states
because of the fracturing of our politics.
And I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible
in somewhere like the United States
or many other countries as well,
because there wasn't that ethnic dimension.
But in fact, many of the way that people talk about politics
has given it that kind of appearance in many respects.
'Cause look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union
and the Soviet period,
and from where you're from, you know, originally in Ukraine,
that language is not the main signifier of identity
and that identity can take all kinds of other forms.
- That's really interesting.
I mean, but there has to be a deep grievance of some kind.
If you took a poll in any of the states in the United States,
I think a very small minority of people
would want to actually secede,
even in Texas where I spend a lot of my time.
I just, I think that there is a common
kind of pride of nation.
You know, there's a lot of people complain
about government and about how the country's going,
the way people complain about the weather when it's raining.
They say, "Oh, this stupid weather, it's raining again."
But really what they mean is we're in the smock together.
There's a together there.
- I also feel that when I go around,
'cause I mean, I've spent a lot of time
since I wrote my book in last October,
and this last year going around, I find the same feeling.
But you know, when I traveled around the Soviet Union,
back in the late 1980s,
I didn't get any kind of sense that people wanted
to see the end of the Soviet Union either.
It was an elite project.
There's a really great book called "Collapse"
by Vladislav Zubok, who is a professor
at London School of Economics at LSE.
And Zubok is pretty much my age,
and he's from the former Soviet Union, he's Russian.
And I mean, he describes it very quite aptly
about how it was kind of the elites,
you know, that basically decided
to pull the Soviet Union apart.
And there is a risk of that here as well,
when you get partisan politics
and people forgetting that they're Americans,
and they are all in this together,
like a lot of the population thing.
But they think that their own narrow partisan
or ideological precepts account for more.
And in the Soviet case, of course,
it was also a power play,
in a way that actually can't quite play out
in the United States,
because it was the equivalent of governors in many respects
who got together three of them,
you know, in the case of the heads of Russia,
Ukraine, and Belarus,
who then got rid of basically
the central figure of Mikhail Gorbachev.
It would be a little difficult to do that.
The dynamic is not the same,
but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up
in the late 1980s and the early '90s.
I spent a lot of time in Russia,
as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus Central Asia
and other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But you kind of see the same elite divisions here
in the United States pulling in different directions
and straining the overall body politic.
And the way that national politics gets imposed
on local politics,
in ways that it certainly wasn't
when I first came to the US in 1989.
I didn't honestly, in 1989, when I first came here,
I didn't know anybody's political affiliation.
I mean, I rarely knew their religious affiliation.
And, you know, obviously race was a major phenomenon here
that was a shock to me when I first came.
But many of the kind of the class, regional, geographic,
you know, kind of political dimensions
that I've seen in other places,
I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now.
- And you take a lot of pride
to this day of being non-partisan.
That said, so you served
for the George W. Bush, Barack Obama,
and Donald Trump administrations,
always specializing in Eurasia and Russia.
You were the top presidential advisor to President,
former President Donald Trump on Russia and Europe,
and famously testified in his first impeachment trial
in 2019, saying, "I take great pride
in the fact that I'm non-partisan foreign policy expert."
So given that context, what does non-partisan mean to you?
- Well, it means being very careful
about not putting any kind of ideological lens
on anything, you know, that I'm analyzing
or looking out or saying about foreign policy, for one thing,
but also not taking, you know,
kind of one stance of one party over another either.
To be honest, I've always found American politics
somewhat confounding because both the Democratic
and the Republican Party are pretty big tents.
I mean, they're coalitions.
You know, in Europe, it's actually kind of,
in some respects, easier to navigate
the parameters of political parties
because you have quite clear platforms.
There's also a longer history in many respects, obviously.
I mean, there's a long history here in the United States
of the development of the parties,
§05Transcript · 32:13–40:10
going back to the late 18th century.
But in the United Kingdom, for example,
in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties,
it was quite easy to get a handle on.
You know, at one point in the UK, for example,
the parties were real, genuine mass parties
with people who were properly members
and took part in regular meetings and paid dues.
And, you know, it was easy to kind of see
what they stood for.
And the same in Europe, you know,
when you look at France and in Germany
and Western Germany, of course, Italy and elsewhere.
Here in the United States, it's kind of pretty amorphous.
You know, the fact that you could kind of register,
you know, randomly, it seems to be a Democrat or Republican,
like Trump did.
At one point, he's a Democrat.
Next thing, he's a Republican.
And then you kind of usurp a party apparatus.
But you don't have to be, you're not vetted in any way.
You're not kind of, you know,
they don't check you out to see
if you have ideological coherence.
You know, you could have someone like Bernie Sanders
on the other side, on the left,
you know, basically calling himself a socialist
and running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
So, you know, kind of in many respects,
parties in the United States are much more loose movements.
And I think you can, you know,
it's almost like a kind of an a la carte menu
of different things that people can pick out.
And it's more over time, as I've noticed,
become more like a kind of an affiliation
even with the sporting team.
I mean, I get very shocked by the way that people say,
well, I couldn't do this because, you know,
that's my side and I couldn't do anything
and I couldn't support someone for the other side.
I mean, I have a relative in my extended family here
who is a, you know, died in the war Republican
and on, you know, family holiday,
there was a book on their table,
said a hundred reasons for voting for a Democrat.
And I said, hey, are you thinking
of shifting party affiliation?
Then I opened the book and it's blank.
It was pretty funny.
I had to laugh.
I thought, well, there you go then.
You know, there's just, there's no way that, you know,
people can pull themselves out of these frames.
So for me, it's very important
to have that independence of thought.
I think you can be politically engaged on the issues,
but, you know, basically without taking a stance
that's defined by some ideology
or some sense of kind of parties on affiliation.
- I think I tweeted about this, maybe not eloquently.
And the statement, if I remember correctly,
was something like, if you honestly can't find
a good thing that Donald Trump did
or a good thing that Joe Biden did,
you're not thinking about ideas.
You just pick the tribe.
I mean, it was more eloquent than that,
but it was basically, this is a really good test
to see are you actually thinking
about like how to solve problems
versus like your red team or blue team,
like a sporting team.
Can you find a good idea of Donald Trump's that you like,
if you're somebody who is against Donald Trump
and like acknowledge it to yourself privately?
Oh, that's a good idea.
I'm glad he said that.
- Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions,
which he often did actually.
I mean, obviously he put them in a way
that most of us wouldn't have done,
but there was often kind of questions
about why is this happening?
Why are we doing this?
And we have to challenge ourselves all the time.
So yeah, actually, why are we doing that?
And then you have to really inspect it
and say whether it's actually worth continuing that way
or they should be doing something differently.
Now he had a more kind of destructive quality
to those kinds of questions,
about maybe it's the real estate developer in him
that was taking a big wrecking ball
to all of these kinds of sacred edifices
and things like that.
So often, if you really paid attention,
he was asking a valid set of questions
about why do we continue to do things like this?
Now, he didn't often have answers
about what he was gonna do in response,
but those questions still had to be asked
and we shouldn't be just rejecting them out of turn.
- And another strength,
the thing that people often,
that criticize Donald Trump will say is a weakness
is his lack of civility can be a strength
because I feel like sometimes bureaucracy functions
on excessive civility.
Actually, I've seen this, it's not just,
it's bureaucracy in all forms.
In tech companies, as they grow,
everybody kinda, you're getting a pretty good salary,
everyone's comfortable and there's a meeting
and you discuss how to move stuff forward.
And you don't wanna be the asshole in the room
that says, "Why are we doing this this way?
"This could be unethical, this is hurting the world,
"this is totally a dumb idea."
Like, I mean, I could give specific examples
that I have on my mind currently that are technical,
but the point is oftentimes the person that's needed
in that room is an asshole.
- Yeah. - That's why Steve Jobs worked,
that's why Elon Musk works, you have to roll in,
that's what first principles thinking looks like.
- The one bit when it doesn't work
is when they start name-calling.
- Sure. - Kind of inciting violence
against the people that they disagree with.
So that was kind of your problem,
because I mean, often, when I was in the administration,
I had all of Europe in my portfolio as well as Russia.
And there were many times when we were dealing
with our European colleagues
where he was asking some pretty valid questions
about, "Well, why should we do this if you're doing that?"
For example, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,
the United States has been opposed
to Europe's reliance on gas and oil exports from Russia.
You know, the Soviet Union since the '70s and '80s.
And Trump kept pushing this idea about,
"So why are we spending so much money on NATO
and NATO defense, and we're all talking about this,
if you're then basically paying billions to Russia for gas?
Isn't this contradictory?"
And of course it was, but it was the way that he did it.
And I actually, one instance had a discussion
with a European defense minister,
basically said to me, "Look, he's saying exactly
the same things as people said before him,
including former Defense Secretary Gates.
It's just the way he says it."
You know, so they took offense.
And then as a result of that, they wouldn't take action
because they took offense at what he said.
So it was a kind of then a way of,
"Could you find some other means of,
you know, massaging this communication
to kind of make it effective?"
Which we would always try to focus on.
Because it's a kind of, it was the delivery.
But the actual message was often spot on
in those kinds of issues.
I mean, he was actually highlighting,
you know, these ridiculous discrepancies
between what people said and what they actually did.
- And it's the delivery, the charisma in the room too.
I'm also understanding the power of that, of a leader.
It's not just about what you do at a podium,
but in a room with advisors, how you talk about stuff,
how you convince other leaders.
- Yeah, you don't do it through gratuitous insults
and incitement to violence.
That's one of the things you just,
you don't get anywhere on that front.
- Well, I mean, it's possible.
- Tough measures and maximum pressure
often though does work.
Because there were, you know, often times where,
you know, that kind of relentless,
you know, nagging about something or constantly raising it
actually did have results, but it hadn't previously.
So there's, you know, the maximum pressure,
if it, you know, kind of kept on it in the right way.
And, you know, often when we were, you know,
coming in behind on pushing on issues,
you know, related to NATO or, you know,
other things in this same sphere,
it would actually have an effect.
It just doesn't get talked about
because it gets overshadowed by, you know,
all of the other kind of stuff around this
and the way that, you know,
he interacted with people and treated people.
- What was the heart, the key insights
to your testimony in that impeachment?
- Look, I think there is a straight line
between that whole series of episodes
and the current war in Ukraine.
Because Vladimir Putin and the people around him
§06Transcript · 40:12–48:25
in the Kremlin concluded that the US
did not care one little bit about Ukraine
and that it was just a game.
For Trump, it was a personal game.
He was basically trying to get Vladimir Zelensky
to do him a personal favor related to his desire
to stay on in power in the 2020 election.
And generally, they just thought that we were using Ukraine
as some kind of proxy or some kind of instrument
within our own domestic politics
'cause that's what it looked like.
And I think that, you know, as a result of that,
Putin, you know, took the idea away
that he could, you know, do whatever he wanted.
We were constantly being asked, even prior to this,
by people around Putin, like, you know,
Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the National Security
Council equivalent in Russia, who we met with frequently,
"What's Ukraine to you? We don't get it.
You know, why do you even care?"
So they thought that we weren't serious.
They thought that we weren't serious
about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence
or it is a national security player.
And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate
the political space in the United States.
Actually, he could because what he was doing
was seeding all this dissent and fueling, you know,
already in a debate inside of US politics,
the kinds of, you know, things that we see
just kind of coming out now.
This kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden,
that Ukraine was, you know, basically just trying
to extract things from the United States,
that Ukraine had somehow played inside of US politics.
Trump was convinced that the Ukrainians
had done something against him,
that they had intervened in the elections.
And that was kind of, you know,
a combination of people around him
trying to find an excuse as to, you know,
kind of what had happened in the election
to kind of divert attention away
from Russia's interference in 2016
and the Russians themselves poisoning the well
against Ukraine.
So you had a kind of a confluence of circumstances there.
And what I was trying to get across in that testimony
was the national security imperative
of basically getting our act together here
and separating out what was going on
in our domestic politics from what was happening
in our national security and foreign policy.
I mean, I think we contributed in that whole mess
around the impeachment,
but it's the whole parallel policies around Ukraine
to the war that we now have that we're confronting.
- Signaling the value we place in peace and stability
in that part of the world,
or the reverse by saying we don't care.
- Yeah, we seem to not care.
It was just a game.
- But the US role in that war is a very complicated one.
That's one of the variables.
Just on that testimony,
did it in part break your heart
that you had to testify essentially
against the president of the United States?
Or is that not how you saw it?
- I don't think I would describe it in that way.
I think what I was was deeply disappointed
by what I saw happening in the American political space.
I didn't expect it.
Look, I was a starry-eyed immigrant.
I came to the United States with all of these expectations
of what the place would be.
I'd already been disabused of some of the,
let's just say rosy perspectives
I had of the United States.
I'd been shocked by the depths of racial problems.
It doesn't even sum up the problems
we have in the United States.
I mean, I couldn't get my head around it when I first came.
I mean, I'd read about slavery in American history,
but I hadn't fully fathomed really the kind of the way
that it was ripping apart the United States.
I mean, I'd read Alex's talk, Phil,
and he'd commented on this,
and it obviously hadn't kind of changed
to the way that one would have expect all this time
from the 18th century onwards.
So that was kind of one thing
that I realized the civil rights movement
and all of these acts of expansion of suffrage
and everything else were imperfect at best.
I was born in '65, the same time as the Civil Rights Act,
and there's a heck of a long way still to go.
So I wasn't, let's just say,
as starry-eyed about everything as I'd been before,
but I really saw an incredible competence
and professionalism in the US government,
it was in the election system and the integrity of it.
And I mean, I really saw that.
I saw that the United States was the gold standard
for kind of some of its institutions.
And I worked in the National Intelligence Council,
and I'd seen the way that the United States
had tried to address the problems that it had faced
in its whole botched analysis of Iraq
and this terrible strategic blunder of,
honestly, a crime in my view of invading Iraq,
but the way that people were trying to deal with that
in the aftermath.
I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council
and the DNI, the office of the Director
of National Intelligence,
when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong
in the whole analysis about Iraq in 2003,
in the whole wake of people trying to pull together
after 9/11 and to learn all of the lessons from all of this.
And I saw just really genuine striving and deliberation
about what had gone wrong,
what lessons could we learn from this?
And then suddenly I found myself in this,
I couldn't really describe it in any words,
just totally crazy looking glass,
thinking of Alice in Wonderland,
Alice Through the Looking Glass version
of American politics.
I mean, I'd seen everything starting to unravel
over a kind of a period of time
before I'd been asked to be in the administration,
but I did not expect it to be that bad, I honestly didn't.
I mean, I'd been warned by people that this was
really a very serious turn
that the United States had taken,
but I really thought that national security
would still be uppermost in people's minds.
And it was, I mean, a lot of the people that I work with,
but what I found, if you want to use that term
of heartbreaking, was the way in which
all of these principles that I had really bought into
and tried to uphold in the United States government
and in the things that we were trying to do
with me and my colleagues
was just being thrown out the window.
And that I would have to step up in defense of them
and in defense of my colleagues
who were being lambasted and criticized
and given death threats for actually standing up
and doing their own jobs.
- In particular on the topic of Ukraine?
- Not just on Ukraine, but on national security overall.
So, I mean, I'd gone through this whole period
even before we got to that point
of seeing non-partisan government officials
being attacked from all sides, left and right,
but especially the right,
and being basically accused of being partisan hacks,
you know, deep state, coup plotters, you name it.
There, patriotism being questioned as well.
And a lot of people I work with in government,
like myself, naturalized Americans,
a lot of them were immigrants, many were refugees,
and many people had fought in wars
on behalf of the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan,
being blown up.
And, you know, they put their lives on the line.
They put their family lives on the line, you know,
because they believed in America.
And they were just, they were reflections of Americans
from all kinds of walks of life.
It's what really made, you know,
that cliche of America great.
It wasn't, you know, whatever it was,
it was being bandied around
in these crude, crass political terms.
It was just the strength of an incredible set of people
who've come together from all kinds of places
and decided that they're going to make a go of it,
and that they're going to, you know,
try to work towards the whole, you know,
idea of the preamble of the Constitution
towards a more perfect union.
And I, you know, I saw people doing that every single day,
despite all of the things that they could criticize
about the United States,
still believing in what they were doing
and believing in the promise of the country,
which is what I felt like.
And then here we were,
people were just treating it like a game,
and they were treating people like dirt,
and they were just playing games with people's lives.
I mean, we all had death threats.
You know, people's, you know, whole careers,
which were not just careers for their own self-aggrandizement,
but careers of public service,
trying to give something back, were being shattered.
And I found, you know, I just thought to myself,
§07Transcript · 48:26–56:08
I'm not going to let that happen,
because, you know, I've come from a,
well, are they going to send me back
to Bishop Auckland in County Durham?
Fine, I'm totally fine to go back, you know,
because I could do something back there,
but I'm not going to let this happen.
I've made this choice to come to America.
I'm all in.
And these guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots,
and they're ruining it.
You know, they're ruining it for everybody.
- So the personal attacks on competent,
hardworking, passionate people
who have love for what they do in their heart,
similar stuff I've seen for virologists and biologists,
so colleagues, basically scientists,
in the time of COVID when there's a bunch of cynicism,
and there was just personal attacks,
including death threats on people that, you know,
work on viruses, work on vaccines.
- Yeah, and they're going around in, you know,
basically with protective gear on
in case somebody shoots them in the street.
That's just absurd.
- But let me zoom out from the individual people.
- Yeah.
- And actually look at the situations that we saw
in the George W. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump presidencies.
And I'd like to sort of criticize each
by not the treatment of individual people,
but by the results.
- Right, yeah, I think that's fair, yeah.
- So if we look at George W. Bush,
and maybe you can give me insights,
this is what's fascinating to me.
When you have extremely competent,
smart, hardworking, well-intentioned people,
how do we, as a system,
make mistakes in foreign policy?
So the big mistake you can characterize in different ways,
but in George W. Bush is invading Iraq.
- Yeah, that's key.
- Or maybe how it was invaded,
or maybe how the decision process was made to invade it.
Again, Afghanistan, maybe not the invasion,
but details around, like, having a plan
about, you know, how to withdraw, all that kind of stuff.
And Barack Obama, to me, similarly,
is a man who came to fame early on
for being somebody who was against,
a rare voice against the invasion of Iraq,
which was actually a brave thing to do at that time.
And nevertheless, he, I mean, I don't know the numbers,
but I think he was the president for years
over increased drone attacks,
everything from a foreign policy perspective,
the military industrial complex,
that machine grew in power under him, not shrunk,
and did not withdraw from Afghanistan.
And then with Donald Trump,
the criticisms that you're presenting,
sort of the personal attacks, the chaos,
the partisanship of people
that are supposed to be non-partisan.
So that, you know, if you sort of to steel man the chaos,
to make the case for chaos,
maybe we need to shake up the machine,
throw a wrench into the engine, into the gears.
And then every individual gear
is gonna be very upset with that, because it's a wrench.
It's not, it's an inefficient process,
but maybe it leads for government.
It forces the system as a whole, not the individuals,
but the system to reconsider how things are done.
So obviously all of those things,
the actual results are not that impressive.
- You could have done that on the latter,
you know, shaking things up,
because I'm all one for questioning
and trying to shake things up as well
and do things differently.
But, you know, the question is,
if you bring the whole system down with nothing,
ideas of putting it to place.
Like, I mean, like many people,
I've studied the Bolshevik Revolution
and, you know, many others as well.
And, you know, kind of what's, you know,
what's the pattern here, you know,
that actually fits into what you're talking about here
is a kind of rigidity of thought
on the part of revolutionaries in many cases as well.
And also narcissism.
In fact, I think that it takes a pretty, you know,
strong sense of yourself, you know,
kind of an own yourself
to want to be president of the United States, for example.
We see that in, you know,
many of our presidents have been narcissists
to different, you know, kind of degrees.
You think about Lenin, you know, for example,
and people can go back and read about Lenin.
He formed his views when he was about 18
and he never shook them off.
He never evolved.
He didn't have any kind of diversity of thought.
And when systems go awry,
it's when they don't bring in different perspectives.
And so, you know, Trump,
if he brought in different perspectives
and actually listened to them
and not just, you know,
believed that he himself knew better than anyone else
and then tried to divide everybody against each other,
it would have been a different matter.
It's a tragedy of a completely
and utterly lost set of opportunities
because of the flaws in his own nature.
Because, I mean, again,
there was all kinds of things
that he could have done to shake things up.
And so many people around him
remained completely disappointed.
And of course he divided
and pitted people against each other,
you know, creating so much factionalism
in American politics that, you know,
people have forgotten they're Americans.
They think that they're red or blue,
you know, parts of teams.
And, you know, if you go back over history,
that's kind of a recipe for war and, you know,
internal conflict.
You go back to, you know,
the Byzantine Empire, for example,
there's the famous episode of the Nike riots
in Constantinople where the whole city gets trashed
because the greens, the reds, the blues,
and these various sporting teams in the Hippodrome
get whipped up by political forces
and they, you know, they pull the place apart.
And that's, you know, kind of where we've been heading
on some of these trajectories.
But the other point is when you look back,
you know, at Bush and Obama as well,
there's a very narrow circle of decision-making.
You know, at Bush period,
it's the focus on the executive branch
with Dick Cheney as the vice president
being very fixated on it.
And Obama, it's, you know, he and, you know,
kind of the bright young things around him,
you know, from, he himself is, you know,
kind of intellectually, you know,
one might say arrogant in many respects, you know,
he was a very smart guy and, you know,
he's convinced that he has,
and he ruminates over a lot of things,
but he's the person who makes, you know,
a lot of decisions.
And basically George W. Bush
used to call himself the decider as well, right?
I mean, they're all the people who make the decisions.
It's not always as consultative as you might think it is.
And for Trump, it's like,
I'm not listening to anybody at all.
You know, it's just me and whatever it is
that I've woken up today and I've decided to do.
So I think, you know, the problem with all of our systems
and why we don't get results
is because we don't draw upon, you know,
the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of,
you know, people out there.
Like you do that in science.
I mean, when, I mean,
all of my friends and relatives are in science.
They've got these incredible collaborations with people,
you know, across the world.
I mean, how did we get to these vaccines for the COVID virus?
Because of this incredible years of collaboration
and of, you know, sharing results and sharing ideas.
And our whole system has become ossified.
You know, we think about the congressional system,
for example, as well.
And there's, you know, this kind of rapid, you know,
turnover that you have in Congress every two years.
You know, there's no incentive for people,
you know, basically to work with others.
They're constantly campaigning.
They're constantly trying to appeal to whatever their base is
and they don't really care about, you know,
some do, you know, of their constituents,
but a lot of people don't.
And the Senate, it's all kind of focused on the game
of legislation for so many people as well.
Not focusing again on that kind of sense about
what are we doing like scientists to kind of work together,
you know, for the good of the country to push things along.
And also our government also is siloed.
§08Transcript · 56:11–1:03:35
There's not a lot of mechanisms
for bringing people together.
There ought to be in things like
the National Security Council,
the National Intelligence Council actually did that
quite successfully at times for analysis that I saw.
But we don't have, you know,
we have it within the National Institutes of Health,
but we saw the CDC break down on this, you know,
kind of front.
We don't have sufficient to those institutions
that bring people together
from all kinds of different backgrounds.
You know, one of the other problems that we've had
with government, with the federal government
over, you know, state and local government,
is it's actually quite small.
People think that the federal government's huge
because we've got postal service and the military
that are part of it,
but your actual federal government employees
is a very small number.
And, you know, the senior executive service part of that
is the older white guys, you know,
who kind of come up all the way over the last,
you know, several decades.
We have a really hard time bringing in younger people
into that kind of government service,
unless they're political hacks, you know,
and they want to, you know, kind of,
or they're kind of looking for power
and, you know, sort of influence.
We have a hard time getting people like yourself
and other, you know, younger people kind of coming in
to make a career out of public service
and also retaining them because, you know,
people with incredible skills often get poached away
into the private sector.
And, you know, a lot of the people that I work with
in the national security side are now at all kinds of,
you know, high-end political consultancies,
or they've gone to Silicon Valley
and they've gone to this place and that place
because after a time as a younger person,
they're not rising up particularly quickly
because there's a pretty rigid way of looking at
the hierarchies and the promotion schemes.
And they're also getting lambasted by everybody.
People like, you know, public servants,
they're not really public servants.
There's this whole lack and loss
of a kind of a faith in public service.
And, you know, the last few years
have really done a lot of damage.
We need to revitalize our government system
to get better results.
We need to bring more people in,
even if it's, you know, for a period of time,
not just through expensive contracts
for, you know, the big consulting companies
and, you know, other entities
that do government work out there,
but getting people in for a period of time,
expanding some of these management fellowships
and the White House fellows,
and, you know, bringing in, you know,
scientists, you know, from the outside,
giving, you know, that kind of opportunity
for collaboration that we see in other spheres.
- I think that's actually one of the biggest roles
for a president that, for some reason,
during the election, that's never talked about
is how good are you at hiring
and creating a culture of, like, attracting the right,
I mean, basically chief hire.
When you think of a CEO, like, the great CEOs are,
I mean, maybe people don't talk about it that often,
but they do more often for CEOs than they do for presidents,
is, like, how good are you at building a team?
- Well, we make it really difficult
because of the political process.
I mean, and also because we have
so many political appointments,
we ought to have less, to be honest.
I mean, if you look at other governments around the world,
you know, that are smaller,
it's much easier for them to hire people in.
You know, some of the most successful governments
are much smaller, and it's not that I say that, you know,
the government is necessarily too big,
but it's just thinking about each unit in a different way.
We shouldn't be having so many political appointments.
We should kind of find more professional appointments,
more non-partisan appointments,
because, you know, every single administration
that we've had over the last,
let's see, span of presidencies,
they have jobs that are unfulfilled
because they can't get their candidates
through Congress and the Senate
because of all the kind of political games
that are being played.
I know loads of people have just been held up
because it's just on the whim of, you know,
some member of Congress,
even though that the actual position that they want
is really technical and doesn't really care about what,
you know, what political preference they particularly have.
So I think we have to try to look
at the whole system of governments
in the way that we would over, you know,
other professional sectors,
and to try to think about this as, just as you said there,
that this is a government
that's actually running our country.
This is an operating system,
and you wouldn't operate it like that
if you were, you know, looking at it
in any kind of rational way.
It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan tainted.
- So you're- - It's every level anyway.
So I would actually just make a bid
for a more non-partisan approach
to a lot of the parts of government.
You can still kind of bring in, you know,
the political and premature,
but also you have to explain to people
writ large in America as well, that this is your government.
And that actually you could also be part of this.
You know, things like the Small Business Administration,
the US Department of Agriculture,
you know, all these kinds of things
that actually people interact with,
but they don't even know it,
the Postal Service, you know, all of these things.
I mean, people actually,
when you ask them about different functions of government,
they have a lot of support for it.
The National Park Service, you know, for example,
it's just when you talk about government
in an abstract way, like, "Oh, yeah, no, too much,
"bloated, you know, not efficient and effective."
But if you kind of bring it down more
to the kind of local and federal levels,
that's kind of, you know, when people really see it.
If people could see kind of themselves reflected,
and many of the people have gone into public service,
I think that they would- - Yeah, they need to be-
- You know, have a lot more support for it.
- More like superstars,
like individuals that are like big on social media,
big in the public eye, and having fun with it,
and showing cool stuff that is not,
'cause right now, a lot of people see government
as basically partisan warfare,
and then it just, it makes it unpleasant to do the job.
It makes it uninspiring for people looking in from outside
about what's going on inside government,
all of it, the whole thing.
But you are, you know, just, with all due respect,
you're a pretty rare individual in terms of nonpartisanship.
Actually, your whole life story,
the humbling aspect of your upbringing
and everything like that,
do you think it's possible to have a lot of nonpartisan
experts in government?
Like, can you be a top presidential advisor on Russia
for 10 years, for 15 years, and remain nonpartisan?
- I think you can.
I don't think that's advisable, though, by the way,
'cause I mean, I don't think anybody should be there,
you know, to see on forever.
- So your first advice is to fight yourself after 10 years?
- Well, you should definitely have term limits,
just like you should in everything, right?
I mean, it's just like tenure in university.
- Well, we all have term limits.
- Yeah, you kind of, you know, we do,
we have natural term limits,
but you know, you're kind of, you know,
basically bottling it up for other people.
I mean, you know, what I'm trying to do now,
I mean, I'm 57 now, and I always try to work with,
you know, people from different generations than me,
just like, you know, I've really benefited from these,
you know, kind of mentorships of people older.
You can, you know, mentor up and well and mentor down.
I mean, I would, you know, try to get, you know,
people from different backgrounds and different generations
to work together in teams, obviously.
I'd like to more team networked kind of approach to things,
the kind of things that you get again in science, right?
I mean, all these ideas are gonna come
from all kinds of different perspectives.
Age and experience does count for something,
but, you know, fresh ideas and coming in
and looking at a problem from a different perspective
and seeing something that somebody else hasn't seen before.
I mean, I just, you know, kind of love working
in an environment with all kinds of different people
§09Transcript · 1:03:38–1:10:33
and people who don't agree with you.
You need people to take you on and say,
"Absolutely, that's crap."
You know, kind of, "Where did you come up with that from?"
And you go, "Hang on."
Well, explain to me why you think so.
And then, you know, you have this kind of
iterative process back and forth.
I mean, I would always encourage my colleagues
to tell me when they thought I was wrong.
I mean, sometimes I didn't agree
because I didn't see the reasoning,
but other times I'd be like, "They're right."
You know, "That was a complete mistake.
I need to admit that."
And, you know, kind of, "We need to figure out
a different way of doing things."
But the one point I do want to get across
is there were a lot of people
who were non-partisan that I worked with.
I mean, honestly, in most of the jobs that I had,
up until more recently,
I had no idea about people's political affiliation.
It's just when you get into this kind of
highly charged partisan environment,
they kind of force people, you know, to make decisions.
And when you have, you know, one political party
or political faction that's trying to usurp power,
it does make it quite difficult.
I mean, that's the situation that we're in right now.
And, you know, we're seeing some of the things
happening in the United States I've seen
and studied in other settings
or seen for myself happening.
You know, when you have a president
who wants to cling onto power,
you know, you've got to call that out.
You know, is that a partisan act
or is that a kind of, you know,
a defense of that larger political system
that you're part of?
You know, so I think we've got to recognize that
even if you're not partisan,
you can be politically engaged.
And, you know, sometimes you just have to
stand up there and speak out,
which is, you know, what I did
and what others did as well.
None of those people who spoke out,
you know, can initially saw that as a partisan act,
even if some of them since then
have decided to make political choices
they hadn't made before.
Because, you know, the situation actually forced people
into, you know, taking sides.
It's very hard to still stay above the fray
when you've got, you know,
someone who's trying to perpetrate a coup.
- Yeah, just to linger on that,
I think it's hard and it's the courageous thing to do
to criticize a president
and not fall into partisanship after.
Because the whole world will assume
if you criticize Donald Trump,
that you're clearly a Democrat.
And so they will just,
everybody will criticize you for being a Democrat.
And then, so you're now stuck in that.
So you're going to just embrace that role.
But to still walk the nonpartisan route
after the criticism, that's the hard road.
So not let the criticisms break you into,
you know, into a certain kind of ideological
set of positions.
- I mean, our political system needs revitalization.
We need to be taking a long, hard look at ourselves here.
And I think what people are calling out for,
look, there's a vast swath of the population,
like me, who are unaffiliated.
You know, maybe some lean in one direction over another.
And unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views
about things and political opinions.
And, you know, you may sound quite extreme on,
you know, some of those, you know,
either from a left or right perspective.
What people are looking for is kind of an articulation,
you know, of things in a kind of a clear way
that they can get a handle on.
And they're also looking for a representation.
Somebody who's going to be there for you,
you know, not part of a kind of a rigid team
that you're excluded from, you know, the ins and the outs.
But what people are looking at now,
they're looking at that in the workplace
because they're not finding that in politics.
You're actually getting workers, you know,
pushing the, people talk about the rise of the worker,
but people just saying, hang on a sec,
you know, the most important space that I'm in right now
is my workplace because that's where my benefits are from.
They're not coming from the state.
I mean, that's a peculiarity of the United States system.
You know, in Britain, you've got the National Health Service
and you've got all the kind of national wide benefits.
You know, you're not tethered to your employer
like you are in the United States.
But here now we're asking people, you know,
people are pushing for more representation.
They're asking to be represented within their workplace.
Be it Starbucks where baristas are, you know,
and other Starbucks employees are trying to unionize.
We have unions among our research assistants,
the Brookings Institution where I am, you know,
kind of teaching assistants and big universities
are doing the same kind of thing as well
because they want to have their voice heard.
They want to kind of play a larger role
and they want to have change.
And they're often pushing their companies
or the institutions they work for to make that change
because they don't see it happening in the political sphere.
So it's not just enough to go out there
and protest in the street,
but if you want something to happen,
that's why you're seeing big corporations
playing a bigger role as well.
- Yeah, and of course there's, you know,
there's the longer discussion.
There's also criticisms of that mechanisms of unions
to achieve the giving of a voice to a people.
This goes back to my own experience
growing up in Northern England.
The Durham miners that I was part of for generations,
you know, first person in my family,
not in the mines on my dad's side,
they created their own association.
It wasn't a union per se at the very beginning.
Later they became part of the National Miners Union.
They lost their autonomy and independence
as a result of that.
But what they did was they pooled their resources.
They set up their own parliament
so they could all get together.
Literally they built a parliament
and it opened in like the same time as World War I
and where they all got together
'cause they didn't have the vote.
They didn't have suffrage at the time
because they didn't have any money, you know,
so they couldn't pay the tax
and they couldn't run for parliament.
And this is, you know,
the kind of the origins of the organized labor parties later,
but they create this association
so they could talk about how they could deal with things
with their own communities
and have a voice in the things that mattered.
You know, education, improving their work conditions.
It wasn't like what you think about
some kind of like big political trade union
with, you know, left-wing, you know, kind of ideas.
In fact, they actually tried to root out later
after the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union,
even when they were still having ties
with players like the miners of Donbass in the 1920s,
Trotskyites and, you know, kind of Leninists
and, you know, communists.
They were more focused on how to improve
their own wellbeing, you know,
what they called the welfare.
They had some welfare societies
where they were kind of trying to think,
and that's kind of what baristas in Starbucks want
or workers in Amazon.
They're looking about their own wellbeing.
It's not just about pay and work conditions.
It's about what it means to be part of this larger entity
because you're not feeling that same kind of connection
to politics, you know, at the moment,
because, you know, you're being told by a representative,
"Sorry, I don't represent you
"because you didn't vote for me."
You know, if you're not a Democrat,
you're not a Republican, you're not red,
you know, you're not blue, you're not mine.
And so people are saying, "Well, I'm in this work class.
"This is kind of my collective.
"You know, this is, you know, therefore,
"this is what I'm gonna have to try to push to make change."
So, I mean, this is kind of happening here,
and we have to, you know, realize that, you know,
we've kind of gone in a way full circle
back to that, you know, kind of period
of the early emergence of sort of mass labor
and, you know, that's where the political parties
that we know today, and, you know,
the kind of early unions came out of as well,
this sort of feeling of a mass society,
but where people weren't really able to get together
and implement or push for change.
§10Transcript · 1:10:35–1:17:46
- You know, with unions at a small scale and a local scale,
it's like every good idea on a small scale
can become a bad idea on a large scale.
- On a large scale, yeah.
- So like marriage is a beautiful thing,
but at a large scale,
it becomes the marriage industrial complex
that tries to make money off of it,
combined with the lawyers
that try to make money off the divorce.
It just becomes this caricature of a thing.
Or like Christmas and the holidays, it's like, it's just-
- I don't disagree, but what I'm saying is
there's people are basically looking for something here
and, you know, kind of, this is why, I mean,
I myself am starting to think about much more local,
you know, kind of solutions for a lot of these,
you know, kind of problems.
It's again, the teamed networked approach.
- On the impeachment, looking back,
because you're part of it, you get to experience it,
do you think they strengthened or weakened this nation?
- I think it weakened in many respects,
just the way that it was conducted.
I mean, there's a new book coming out
by a couple of journalists in the Washington Post,
I haven't actually seen it yet,
but I really did, you know, kind of worry that,
myself, that it became a spectacle.
And although it actually, I think, in many respects,
was important in terms of an exercise
of civic responsibility and, you know,
gave people a big, massive lesson in civics,
everyone's kind of running out
and looking up the whole process of impeachment
and what that meant,
kind of like congressional prerogatives I was as well,
I was, you know, running off myself
and trying to learn an enormous amount about it
'cause I was in the middle of all of this,
that it didn't ultimately show responsibility
and accountability.
And that in itself was weakened
because on both sides, there was a lot of partisan politics.
I mean, I think that there was a dereliction of duty
in many respects.
I mean, especially, I have to say,
on the part of Republican members of Congress,
who were, you know, kind of,
they should have been embracing, you know,
Congress's prerogatives.
You could have, you know, kind of basically done this
in something of a different way.
But the whole thing is because it was this larger atmosphere
of polarized, well, not even polarized,
but fractured politics.
And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say,
in many of the members of Congress on the Republican side.
I mean, there's a lot of grandstanding
that I really didn't like one bit
on the Democratic side either.
And not admitting to mistakes
and, you know, not kind of addressing head-on,
you know, the fact that they'd, you know,
kind of been pushing for, you know,
Trump to be impeached and, you know,
talking about being an illegitimate president,
you know, kind of right from the very beginning.
And that, you know, as a result of that,
a lot of people just saw this
as kind of a continuation of, you know,
political games, you know,
coming out of the 2016 election.
But on the Republican side, it was just a game.
There was people I knew who were, you know,
basically, you know, at one point, one of them winked at me.
You know, in the middle of this, you know,
kind of impeachment, it's just like,
don't take this personally, you know, this is--
- It's a game.
- This is a game.
And I just thought, this isn't a game.
And that's why I think that it, you know,
kind of weakened because, I mean, again, on the outside,
it weakened us, the whole process weakened us
in the eyes of the world, because again,
the United States was the gold standard.
And I do think, I mean, again,
in the terms of the larger population,
although a lot of people did actually see the system,
you know, standing up, trying to do something
to hold people account,
but there still was that element of circus
and a big political game
and people being careless with the country.
- But I do think that the Democrats
were the instigators of the circus.
So as a, it's perhaps subtle,
but there's a different way you talk about issues
or concerns about accountability
when you care about your country,
when you love your country, when you love the ideals,
and when you, versus when you just want to win.
- And stick it to the other side.
No, I agree. - Stick it to the other side.
- I agree.
I mean, there were people who I actually thought
managed that, that made it about the country
rather than about themselves.
- But I guess there's no incentive to do that.
- Yeah, there were a lot of others
who did a lot of grandstanding.
Yeah.
And that's another problem
of our political incentive structures,
that the kind of sense of accountability
and responsibility tends to be personal.
You know, whether people decide to do it or not.
It's not institutional, if that makes sense.
We've had a kind of a breakdown of that kind of, that sense.
Now I took an oath of office,
and I'm assuming that most of them did too.
You know, I had to be sworn in, you know,
when I took those positions.
I took that seriously,
but I already took an oath of citizenship.
There's, you know, presumably you did too, you know.
You kind of started to become an American citizen.
It's not something you take on lightly.
And, you know, that's why I felt
this deep sense of responsibility all the time.
Which is why I went into the administration
in the first place.
I mean, I got a lot of flack for it.
Because, you know, I thought, well, look, I've been asked,
and there's a real issue here,
after the Russian interference
and, you know, the whole influence operation
in the 2016 elections.
And I knew what was going on, and I should do something.
You know, if not me, then, you know, okay,
someone else will go and do it.
But can I live with myself just sitting on the sidelines
and criticizing what people are doing?
You know, and kind of worrying about this?
Or am I actually going to muck in there
and, you know, just go and do something?
It's like seeing your house on fire.
And you see that, you know,
okay, this is pretty awful and dangerous,
but I could go in there and do something.
- To clarify, the house on fire,
meaning the cyber war that's going on,
or cyber attacks, or cyber security.
- Well, in the 2016, you know,
when the Russians had interfered in the election.
You know, I mean, basically,
this was a huge national security crisis.
And our politics, we'd gone mad as a result of it.
And we, in fact, we were making the situation worse.
And I felt that I could, you know, kind of,
at the time, maybe I could do something here.
I could try to clarify.
I could, you know, work with others who I knew
in the government from previous stints in the government
to push back against this
and try to make sure it didn't happen again.
And look, and I also didn't have this, you know,
mad, you know, kind of crazy ideological view
of Russia either.
I mean, I knew the place.
I knew the people had been sitting a long time
and quite calm about it.
I don't take it personally.
It's not kind of an extension of self.
It's, you know, something I've spent a long time
trying to understand for myself,
going back to that very beginning
of why were the Russians trying to blow us up?
There must be an explanation.
There was, it was a very complicated and complex explanation.
It wasn't as simple as how it sounded.
And also, there's a long tail to 2016.
You know, Putin's perceptions,
the kind of things that he thought were going on.
You know, the whole way that what they did
was actually fairly straightforward.
They'd done this before in the Soviet period,
during the Cold War, classic influence operation.
It just had gone beyond the bounds
of anything they could have anticipated
because of social media
and just a confluence of circumstances
in the United States as well.
We were very fragile and vulnerable.
And I remember at one point having a discussion
with the Russian ambassador,
where, you know, we were complaining
about the Russian intervention.
He said, "Are you telling me that the United States
§11Transcript · 1:17:49–1:25:31
"is a banana republic, that it's so vulnerable
"to these kinds of efforts?"
And he actually looked genuinely mystified.
Although, you know, obviously it was probably,
you know, part of a, you know,
kind of political shtick there.
But he had a point.
The United States had never been that vulnerable
as it suddenly was in 2016.
And in the time that I was in government,
and going back to what you asked about the whole impeachment
and the whole exercise in Congress,
that vulnerability was as stark as it, you know,
ever could be.
Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem
as anything else.
They were the kindling to all of the kind of the fires.
Putin didn't start any of this,
other kind of problems.
Domestically, he just took advantage of them.
And, you know, basically added a bit of an excellent
here and there.
- Yeah, the interference.
I mean, that's a much longer discussion
'cause it's also for me, technically fascinating.
I've been playing with the idea of just launching
like a million bots, but that are doing just positive stuff
and just being kind to people.
- Yeah, I always kind of wonder if,
is it possible to do something on this scale
that's positive?
Because, you know, a lot of people seem to be able
to use all of this for pretty negative effect.
You've got to kind of hope that you could do this,
use the same networks for positive effect.
- I think that's actually where a lot of the war,
I think from the original hackers to today,
what gives people like me,
and I think a lot of people that,
in the hacking community,
the pleasure is to do something difficult,
break through the systems and do the ethical thing.
So do the, because if there's something broken
about the system, you want to break through all the rules
and do something that you know in your heart
is the right thing to do.
I mean, that's what Aaron Schwartz did
with releasing journals and publications
that were behind paywalls to the public
and got arrested for it and then committed.
But to me, it's fascinating because I,
maybe you can actually educate me,
but I felt that the Russian interference
in terms of social engineering,
in terms of bots, all that kind of stuff,
I feel like that was more used for political bickering
than to actually understand the national security problem.
Because I would like to know the actual numbers involved
in the influence.
I would like to, I mean, obviously, hopefully,
people now understand that better
than are trying to defend the national security
of this country.
But it's just, it felt like, for example,
if I launch one bot and then just contact somebody
at the New York Times saying, "I launched this one bot,"
they'll just say, "MIT scientist hacks," you know?
(Donna laughs)
And then that, they'll spread.
- But that's exactly what happened.
It was, you know, kind of, I think that, you know,
Putin and some of the people around him understood
because, again, propaganda state,
they spend an awful lot of time thinking about how you,
you know, basically put out your own content
and how you get maximum effect through performance.
Putin himself is a, you know,
political performance artist.
I mean, Trump understood exactly the same thing.
They were actually operating in parallel,
not in collusion, but in parallel.
You know, basically, Trump understood
how to get lots of free air time, you know,
how to get himself at the center of attention.
Putin, you know, did that through a kind of,
I think, a less organic kind of way.
You know, he had a lot of people working around him.
I mean, that's the old, you know, Bolshevik agitprop
and, you know, kind of then the whole
Soviet propaganda machine.
And, you know, Putin kind of growing up
in that kind of environment and having, you know,
kind of the Kremlin press office
and all the kind of people around him,
got kind of a massive machine, knew how that worked.
I mean, they haven't done what the Chinese did in Russia,
of like, you know, blocking everything
and having a big firewall.
It was kind of putting out lots of content,
getting into the, you know, the sort of center of attention.
Trump's doing the same kind of thing.
And the Russians understood that, you know,
if you put a bit of things out there
and then you call up the New York Times
and people are going to run with it.
And what they wanted was the perception
that they had actually swore the election.
They loved it.
This was the huge mistake of the Democrats and everything.
I mean, I kept trying to push against this.
No, they did not elect Donald Trump.
Americans elected Donald Trump.
And, you know, the electoral college was a key part.
Vladimir Putin didn't make that up.
You know, and basically, I also remember, you know,
at one point the Russian ambassador, you know,
talking to me about when we were doing the standard,
you know, here we are, we're lodging our complaint
about the interference, you know, he basically said,
well, we didn't, you know, kind of invent Comey.
And, you know, basically the, you know,
the decision to reopen, you know, Hillary Clinton's emails
or, you know, kind of Anthony Weiner
and, you know, kind of his, you know,
emails on his computer.
And I was like, yeah, he's right.
I mean, you know, there were plenty of things
in our own system that created chaos and tipped the election.
Not, you know, kind of what the Russians did,
but, you know, it's obviously easier to blame the Russians
and blame yourself when, you know, things are kind of,
or those random forces and those random factors.
Because people couldn't understand what had happened in 2016.
There was no hanging chads like 2000,
where there was, you know, kind of a technical problem
that actually, you know, ended up with the intervention
of the Supreme Court.
There was, you know, pure and simple,
the electoral college at work
and a candidate that nobody had expected,
including the Republicans in the primaries, you know,
to end up getting kind of elected or put forward,
you know, just from 2016, suddenly becoming the president.
And they needed a meta explanation.
It was much better to say Vladimir Putin had done it
and Vladimir Putin and, you know, the Kremlin guys
were like, "Oh my God, yeah, fantastic.
Champagne, pop, pop, cocks popping.
This is great. Our chaos agent."
They knew they hadn't done it,
but they'd love to take credit for it.
And so, you know, the very fact that other people
couldn't explain these complex dynamics to themselves,
basically dovetails beautifully with Vladimir Putin's
attempts to be the kind of the Kremlin gremlin in the system.
And he's, you know, basically was taking advantage
of that forever more.
He wanted, you know, to basically try to work with us
to cut through that.
And the thing is then, you know, people lost faith
in the integrity of the election system
because people were out there, you know,
suggesting that the Russians had actually
distorted the elections.
People had written books about that.
They said, you know, that they hacked the system
when, you know, they were trying to hack our minds.
But again, we were the fertile soil for this.
I mean, we know this from Russian history,
the role of the Bolsheviks, you know,
the whole 1920s and 1930s with Stalin,
the fellow travelers and the, you know, socialist,
you know, international.
I mean, the Russians and the Soviets have been
at this for years about kind of pulling, you know,
kind of people along and into kind of a broader frame.
But it didn't mean that they were influencing,
you know, directly the politics of countries,
you know, writ large.
There were plenty of interventions.
It's just that we were somehow,
it was a confluence of events, a perfect storm.
We were somehow exquisitely vulnerable
because of things that we had done to ourselves.
It was what Americans were doing to themselves
that was the issue.
- You think that's the bigger threat
than large-scale bot armies?
- Those can be a threat.
Obviously, they do have an impact,
but it's how people process information.
It's kind of like the lack of critical thinking.
I'm just not on the internet to that extent.
I go looking for information.
I'm not on social media.
I'm in social media, but not by myself.
You know, I don't put myself out there.
I'm not, I haven't got a Twitter feed.
I haven't got a blog. - You don't have
a Twitter one, yeah.
§12Transcript · 1:25:32–1:32:35
But there is a...
- You have a fan club. - There's one called
Fiona Hill's Cat.
I have all kinds of strange things.
It's Fiona Hill's Cat, which I kind of like.
Occasionally, I have people send things to me.
- You have so many fans.
It's hilarious.
- But what I try to do is just be really critical.
I mean, my mom sends me stuff,
and I'm like, "What is this?"
You know, kind of.
- Yeah.
- It's just, you know, your own mother
can be as much of an agent of misinformation
as, you know, Vladimir Putin.
- Oh, yeah.
- I mean, we're all, you know,
kind of we all have to really think
about what it is we're reading.
There's one thing from my childhood
that was really important to me,
and I always think every kid in school should have this.
My next-door neighbor,
who was, he was actually very active in the Labour Party,
and he was, you know, kind of really interested
in the way that opinion, you know,
shaped people's political views.
And he was Welsh.
He was a native Welsh speaker,
so, you know, he was always trying to explore English
and how, you know, there was kind of the reach of,
you know, the English culture,
and, you know, kind of how it was kind of shaping
the way that people thought.
And he used to read every single newspaper,
you know, from all the different spectrums,
which was quite easy to do, you know,
back in the '70s and '80s,
'cause there weren't that many in the UK context.
And every Sunday, he would get
all the different Sunday papers
from all the different kind of ideological vantage points.
And then when I got to be a teenager,
he'd invite me to look at them with him,
'cause he was my godfather,
and he was just an incredible guy,
and he was just super interesting,
and, you know, kind of culturally, you know,
an outsider, always kind of looking in.
And he basically ran through, you know,
what "The Guardian" looked at,
"The Observer," "The Daily Mail," "The Sun,"
you know, kind of all of these, you know,
"The Telegraph," all of these newspapers,
and how you could tell, you know,
their different vantage points.
And, of course, it's complicated to do that now.
I mean, in this, you know,
incredibly extensive media space.
I look at what it is that they're saying,
and then I try to, you know, read around it,
and then, you know, look at what other people are saying,
and why they're saying it, and who are they,
what's their context.
And that was kind of basically
what I was taught to look at.
And I think everybody should have that.
- And certainly that's something that people in politics
that are in charge of directing policy should be doing.
- They should be.
- Not getting lost in the,
in the sort of the hysteria that can be created.
It does seem that the American system somehow,
not the political system, just humans, love drama.
A very good, like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
There's always like one, two, three stories somehow
that we just pick, that we're just gonna,
this is the stuff we're gonna fight about for this election.
- And everyone's got an opinion on it.
Everybody. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- And it's the most, like Hillary Clinton's emails,
the Russians hacked the election.
- Yeah, we had John Podesta's pasta recipes for a while,
you know, that we were kind of all obsessing over.
I don't know, people running out and trying them out,
you know, something like that.
- And there's fun, I mean, there's all,
there's the best conspiracy theories about Giuliani.
I just love it.
We just pick a random story.
Sometimes it's ridiculous.
- And it detracts from what the larger question should be,
which is about the family members of, you know,
senior officials and whether they should be anywhere near
any of the issues that they're, you know,
there's ethics, there's government ethics and things there,
you know, kind of across the board.
But there's a bigger story in there,
but that becomes a distraction.
It's a look over there, you know,
the oldest trick in the book, you know, kind of idea.
- Yes, given- - And politicians
are really good at that because it detracts
from the larger question because every single member
of Congress and, you know, government official,
their family should be nowhere near anything they're doing.
- Well, that I could push back and disagree on.
I mean, I understand- - Well, it depends
on what they do, if they're making money out of it,
you know, and kind of basically being in business
is what I mean, you know, kind of this is an issue.
So it's not, you know, Hunter Biden on his own.
It's, you know, kind of basically the kids of, you know,
the Trump family, you name it.
- Yeah, in general like that, I just think it's funny.
Like, there's a lot of families that, you know,
they work very closely together, do business together,
and it's very successful.
I get very weird about that.
It just feels like you're not, in fact,
I don't even like hiring or working with friends initially.
You make friends with the people you work with, but-
- That's right, no, I have the same worries as well
because in the kind of clouds, you know,
I would encourage, you know, my daughter
to do something completely different.
- Right. - Not go into the same field.
Now, look, it's different if you're, you know,
in science or, you know, mathematics or something like this,
and, you know, maybe, you know, kind of,
you've got a family, maybe you're kind of building
on some of their theories and ideas, you know.
If Albert Einstein had a, you know, kind of an offspring
who was in mathematics and took, you know,
father's thinking, you know, further,
that would be very different.
But if it's, you know, kind of you're in business
and other things, and it's just, you know,
it's the nepotism problem that no one has there.
- Well, science has that too, in the space of ideas.
- Yeah, well, they do.
If they're not, people aren't coming in
and building on the ideas in a constructive way.
- Right, but even for son, daughter of Einstein,
you wanna think outside the box of the previous.
- Yeah, well, that's what I'm meaning,
but I mean, it's just, but they shouldn't be sort of told,
no, sorry, you can't go and study math 'cause, you know,
whatever, physics, you know, because of.
- But a lot of that, you can't actually make it into law.
Well, you could, I suppose, but honestly,
if you do that kind of thing,
you should be transparent.
There should be just an honesty about it.
- It gets back to what I was talking about
before, we need diversity of views
and diversity of thinking, and you can't have other things.
It's like being partisan or, you know,
rooting just for a team.
You know, if something's gonna cloud your judgment
or constrain the way you think about things
and become, you know, kind of a barrier to moving on out.
And look, that's what we see in the system around Putin.
It's kind of kleptocratic, and it's, you know,
it's filled with nepotism.
All of the kind of like the people
who you kind of see out there
in prominent positions are the sons or daughters of,
including Putin himself.
I mean, that's when a system has degenerated.
And that's, you know, kind of,
and I suppose in a way,
this is a symbol of the degeneration of the system,
but again, it's just a diversion from, you know,
kind of the bigger issues and bigger implications
of things that we're discussing.
- So critics on the left often use the straw man of TDS,
Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Why does Donald Trump arouse so much emotion in people?
- It's just the nature of the person.
I mean, I don't feel particularly emotional about him.
I mean, he's kind of a, he's a very flawed guy,
to be honest, and this may seem bizarre,
I felt sorry for him,
because this guy is so vulnerable,
so wrapped up in himself,
that, I mean, he's just exquisitely open to manipulation.
And I saw people taking advantage of him all the time,
and he has zero self-awareness.
I mean, I kept thinking to myself,
my God, if this guy didn't have this entourage around him,
how would he function?
I mean, I felt sorry for us as well,
I mean, that he ended up being our president,
'cause that should not have happened,
I mean, in terms of character,
and in terms of fit for the job.
Although I saw this, you know,
kind of over a period of time,
§13Transcript · 1:32:36–1:39:45
but I didn't feel, you know, kind of any,
you know, sense of derangement, you know,
kind of around him.
He didn't drive me nuts in that way,
I just became, I was just very worried about,
you know, the kind of the impact that he was having
on many particular issues.
- Here's the important thing,
so what I noticed with people that criticize Donald Trump
is they get caught up in the momentum of it,
and they're unable to see,
first of all, let's start with some ground truth,
which is approximately half the country voted for the guy,
right?
- Yep, and more voted in 2020 than voted in 2016 for him.
Yep.
- And I just feel like people don't load that in
when they're honestly criticizing.
- And a lot of those people didn't vote for him
and his personality, and often could,
because I know a lot of people that voted for him,
first time and second time,
and they could disassociate, you know,
kind of all of the kind of features of Donald Trump
that drives other people nuts from, you know,
what they thought that an actual fact he could achieve
in terms of, and it wasn't just this kind of sense about,
well, I couldn't possibly vote for Democrats.
Sometimes it's just like, well, look, he shakes things up
and we need things to shake, to be shoken up and--
- Some people might've voted for him for personality.
See, this is what I'm trying to tell you.
- Yeah, some of them did as well,
but I'm just saying that not all of them did either.
- We don't know that data, that's the thing.
- But yeah, I can't say I'm just saying anecdotally,
I know people have voted for him because he's him,
from the charisma and others who voted
because he's shaking things up
and, you know, he's keeping people on their toes
and, you know, kind of, we need that, you know, idea.
- But the way to avoid Trump Derangement Syndrome, to me,
me as a doctor, I'm sort of prescribing to the patients
on this syndrome, this issue,
is I feel like you have to empathize with the people.
Well, you have to imagine in your mind
all the different, like, strengths
that the people who have voted for Donald Trump see
and really understand it, really feel it,
like walk around with it and then criticize.
Like, I just feel like people get lost
in this bubble of criticism, in their own head.
Forget like the tribe you're in or whatever,
in their own head, they're not able to see,
like half this country that we're a part of
voted for the person, same with Biden.
Half the country voted for the guy.
The people that are criticizing Biden
and they're doing this,
the way Biden is currently criticized
is not based on policy.
It's based on personal stuff similar like to Trump.
- Yeah, I know it is.
I mean, that's what people don't look.
I think part of that is, I mean, look, first of all,
I want to say I completely agree with you
about understanding where people are coming from.
And I think it's very important for people
to listen to other people and their views.
I try to do that all the time, try to learn from that.
You know, I mean, everybody's got a perspective
and a context.
We all live in a certain context.
We're all living in history, our own personal histories,
matter a lot, and also the larger context
and environment in which we're living in
and where we live and who we live with.
And, you know, the kinds of lives that we lead as well,
those are all extraordinarily important.
I mean, I know that from myself.
Everything that I've done in my life
has been shaped by where I came from,
who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things.
You can't take yourself out of that.
I mean, you can do it in some, you know,
like a science or something else,
but, you know, it's still your own views
and maybe some of the ideas that you have.
And pursuing an experiment might have been shaped
by your larger context, you know,
depending on what it is that you work on.
But the other thing is the nature of the political system.
The presidential election is like a personality contest,
a beauty contest.
It's like a kind of a referendum on, you know,
one person or another.
It's kind of like what we see in Russia, honestly,
with, you know, Putin or not Putin,
or Putin and Putin before.
You know, it's all about Putin.
And, you know, what do you think about Putin?
It's all about what the president should be doing
and, you know, kind of what their policies are.
That's kind of the bizarreness of the US political system.
Look, we've just seen this happening in the United Kingdom.
You've got this core of a couple of thousand,
couple of hundred thousand, rather,
people in the Conservative Party
who've just voted for, you know, three leaders in a row.
The rest of the country isn't.
And they're just looking at, you know,
whether they like that personality
and, you know, what they say to them
rather than what they're necessarily
going to do for the country.
I mean, which is, you know, kind of pretty absurd.
And again, the presidency is a weird hybrid
in the United States.
You know, we were talking before about,
it's the person who should be running the country.
It's the chief executive or the prime minister
in another setting.
But we don't think of it like that.
You know, we often think about whether we like the guy
or not, or, you know,
we'd like to hang out with him or the, you know,
one of my younger relatives.
And I said, "So why did you vote for Trump?"
He said, "Well, he was great.
"He was funny.
"I went to his rallies.
"I got, you know, all kind of charged up."
And I said, "Could you see yourself voting for Biden?"
"No, he's too old."
And I said, "Well, you know, he's only just a little bit,
"you know, kind of older than Trump."
Or he's, you know, the same age as your grandma.
Do you think your grandma's older?
"Oh, no, not at all."
But it's just this kind of perception.
He's boring, you know?
So there's, people are actually sometimes, you know,
basically being, you know,
kind of motivated by just a feeling, you know,
kind of that kind of sense,
because that's the sort of nature of the, you know,
the presidency.
It's this kind of how you feel about yourself as an American
or how you feel about the country at large,
the kind of the symbol of the state.
Look, you know, in Britain,
you had Queen Elizabeth II and everybody, you know,
seemed to, for the most part, not everyone, I guess,
but most people respected her as a person,
as a personality, as a kind of symbol of the state,
even if they actually didn't really like
the institution of the monarchy.
There was something, you know,
kind of about that particular personality
that you were able to, you know,
kind of relate to in that context.
But in the United States,
we've got all of that rolled into one,
the head of state, the symbol of the state,
the kind of queen, the king, the kind of idea,
the chief executive, the kind of prime ministerial role,
and then the commander in chief of the military.
It's all things, you know, kind of at once,
but ultimately for a lot of people,
it's just how we feel about that person.
Oh, I couldn't go vote for them because of this,
or I couldn't vote for them because of that.
And in 2016, you know,
Hillary Clinton actually did win the election
in terms of the popular vote.
So it wasn't that, you know,
kind of people wouldn't vote for a woman.
I mean, more people voted for her on the popular level,
not obviously, you know, through the electoral college
in the electoral college vote.
So it wasn't just, you know, gender or something like that,
but it was an awful lot of things
for people who found Trump attractive,
because he was sticking up the big middle finger
to the establishment.
He's an anti-establishment change character.
There was a lot of people voted for Barack Obama
for the same reason and voted for Trump.
We know that phenomenon, what was it, 11,
you know, 12% of people, you know,
so they could vote for some completely,
totally different, radically different people
because of that sort of sense of change and charisma.
I mean, I had people who I knew voted for Trump,
but would have voted for Obama again if he'd run again,
because they just liked the way that he spoke,
they liked the way that, you know, 'cause they said,
I mean, this is all my own anecdotal things,
but one of my relatives said,
"I could listen to Obama all day, every day.
§14Transcript · 1:39:47–1:47:23
I just love the way he sounded.
I love the way he looked."
You know, I just like the whole thing about him.
And then to say about Trump, well, he was exciting.
He was interesting.
You know, he was kind of like, you know,
whipping it up there.
You know, so there's this, just this kind of feeling.
You know, we always say about, you know,
could you have a beer with this person?
And people decide they couldn't have one
with Hillary Clinton.
And, you know, maybe they could go off
and have one with Barack Obama and with Donald Trump.
They didn't want to have one with Joe Biden,
you know, for example.
And remember, George W. Bush didn't drink,
so he wouldn't have had a beer with him.
He'd have gone out and got a soda or something with him.
But, you know, there's this,
there's that kind of element
of just that sort of personal connection
in the way that the whole presidential election is set up.
It's less about the parties.
It's less about the platforms,
and it's more about the person.
- Yeah, and picking one side
and like sticking with your person.
It really like a support team.
- Yeah, it is, yeah.
- What do you think about Vladimir Putin,
the man and the leader?
Let's actually look at the full,
you've written a lot about him,
the recent Vladimir Putin
and the full context of his life.
Let's zoom out and look at the last 20 plus years
of his rule.
In what ways has he been good for Russia?
In what ways bad?
- Well, if you look to the first couple of terms
of his presidency,
I think, you know, on the overall ledger,
he would have actually said
that he made a lot of achievements from Russia.
Now, there was, of course,
the pretty black period of the war in Chechnya,
but, you know, he didn't start that.
That was Boris Yeltsin.
That was obviously a pretty catastrophic event.
But if you look at then other parts of the ledger
of what Putin was doing,
you know, from the 2000s, you know, onwards,
he stabilized the Russian economy,
brought back, you know, kind of confidence
in the Russian economy and financial system.
He built up a pretty impressive team of technocrats
for everything, the central bank and the economics
and finance ministries,
who, you know, really got the country back into shape again
and solvent, paid off all of the debts,
and, you know, really started to build the country
back up again domestically.
And, you know, the first couple of terms,
again, putting Chechnya, you know, to one side,
which was a little hard because, I mean,
there was quite a lot of atrocities.
And I have to say that, you know,
he was pretty involved in all of that
because the FSB, which he'd headed previously,
you know, was in charge of wrapping up Chechnya,
and it created, you know,
kind of a very strange sort of system of fealty,
almost a feudal system,
and the kind of relationship between Putin at the top
and Kadyrov in Chechnya.
And there was quite a lot of distortions,
you know, kind of as a result of that
in the way that the Russian Federation was run.
You know, a lot more of an emphasis
on the security services, for example,
but there was a lot of pragmatism,
you know, opening up the country for business,
you know, basically extending our relationships.
I would say that, you know,
by the end of those first couple of terms of Putin,
Russians were living their best lives.
You know, there was a lot of opportunity for people.
People's labor, you know, was being paid for.
They weren't being taxed.
The taxes were coming out of the extractive industries.
There was, you know, kind of, I guess,
a sense of much more political pluralism,
but it wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Eltsin period.
And then you see a shift.
And it's pretty much when he comes back into power again
in 2011, 2012,
and that's when we see kind of a different phase emerging.
And, you know, part of it
is the larger international environment
where Putin himself has become kind of convinced
that the United States is out to get him.
And part of it goes back to the decision
on the part of the United States to invade Iraq in 2003.
There's also, you know,
the recognition of Kosovo in 2008,
and, you know, the whole kind of machinations
around all kinds of, you know,
other issues of NATO expansion and elsewhere.
But Iraq in 2003,
and this kind of whole idea after that,
that the United States is in the business of regime change,
and perhaps, you know, has him in his crosshairs as well.
But there's also then kind of, I think,
a sense of building crisis
after the financial crisis and the Great Recession,
2008, 2009,
because I think Putin up until then believed in,
you know, the whole idea of the global financial system
and that Russia was prospering,
and that Russia, you know, part of the G8
and actually could be genuinely one of the, you know,
the major economic and financial powers.
And then suddenly he realizes
that in the West is incompetent,
that, you know, we totally mismanaged the economy
of our own, the financial crash in the United States,
the kind of blowing up of the housing bubble,
and that we were feckless,
and that that had global reverberations.
And he's prime minister, of course,
you know, in this kind of period.
But then, you know,
and I think that that kind of compels him
to kind of come back into the presidency
and try to kind of take things under control again
in 2011, 2012.
And after that, he goes into kind of a much more
sort of focused role where he sees the United States
as a bigger problem.
And he also, you know, starts to, you know,
kind of focus on also the domestic environment,
because his return to the presidency is met by protests.
And he genuinely seems to believe,
because again, this is very similar to belief here
in the United States that Donald Trump
couldn't possibly be elected by Americans,
that somehow there was some kind of external interference,
because the Russians interfered and had an impact.
Putin himself thinks at that time,
it's one of the reasons why he interferes
in our elections later,
that the United States and others had interfered,
because he knew that people weren't that thrilled
about him coming back.
They kind of liked the Medvedev period.
And the protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg
and other major cities,
he starts to believe are instigated by the West,
by the outside, because of, you know,
funding for transparency in elections
and, you know, all of the NGOs and others,
you know, they're operating,
State Department, embassy funding,
you know, and, you know,
the whole attitude of, "God, he's back,"
you know, kind of thing.
And so after that,
we see Putin going on a very different footing.
It's also somewhere in that period, 2011, 2012,
we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine.
And he's always, you know, I think,
been kind of steeped in that whole view of Russian history.
I mean, I heard at that time, I was in,
I've written about this in many of the things that,
you know, I've written about Putin,
that in that same timeframe,
I'm going to all these conferences in Russia
where Putin is and Peskov, his press secretary,
and they talk about him reading Russian history.
I think it's this, in this kind of period,
that he formulates this idea
of the necessity of reconstituting the Russian world,
the Russian empire.
He's obviously been very interested in this.
He's always said, of course,
that the collapse of the Soviet Union
was the great catastrophe of the 20th century,
but also the collapse of the Russian empire before it.
And he starts to be critical about Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine
as the same country,
Ukrainians and Russians being one and the same.
And this is where the ledger flips,
because, I mean, the initial question you asked me
is about, well, has Putin been good for Russia or not?
And this is where we get into the focal point of,
or the point where he's not focusing
on the prosperity and stability and future of Russia,
but he starts to obsess about the past
§15Transcript · 1:47:26–1:55:50
and start to take things in a very different direction.
He starts to clamp down at home
because of the rise of opposition
and the fact that he knows that his brand
is not the same as it was before,
and his popularity is not the same as it was before,
because he's already gone over that period
in anybody's professional and political life
that if you stay around long enough,
people get a bit sick of you.
It's just, we talked about that before.
Should you stay kind of in any job
for a long period of time, you need refreshing.
And Putin is starting to look like
he's going to be there forever,
and people are not happy about that,
and would like the chance as well to move on and move up,
and with him in still in place,
that's not going to be particularly possible.
And that's around the time when he starts
to make that decision of annexing Crimea,
and that's when the whole thing flips, in my view.
The annexation of Crimea in 2014 is the beginning of the end
of Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia,
because if you pay very close attention
to his speech on the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014,
you see all of the foreshadowing of where we are now.
It's already of kind of his view of kind of his obsessions,
his historical obsessions, his view of himself
as being kind of fused with the state,
a kind of a modern czar,
and his idea that the West is out to get him,
and it becomes after that,
almost a kind of like a messianic mission,
to turn things in a different direction.
- And who are the key people to you
in this evolution of the human being of the leader?
Is it Petr Shchev?
Is it Shoygu, the Minister of Defense?
Is it, like you mentioned, Peskov, the Press Secretary?
What role do some of the others like Lavrov play?
- I think it's more rooted in the larger context.
I mean, individuals matter in that context,
but it's just kind of like this shared worldview.
And if you go back to the early 1990s,
immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
when Yeltsin and his counterparts in Ukraine, Belarus,
pull it apart, there was an awful lot of people
who wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, not just Putin.
I mean, you remember after Gorbachev
tried to have the new union treaty in 1991,
and there was the emergency committee set up,
the coup against Gorbachev.
It was because they were worrying he was going too far
and unraveling the union then as well.
They were opposed to his reforms.
There's always been a kind of a very strong
nationalist contingent that become Russian nationalists
over time rather than Soviet hardliners,
who basically want to maintain the empire,
the union in some form.
And in the very early part of the 1990s,
there was a lot of pressure put on Ukraine
and all the other former Soviet republics,
now independent states, by people around,
Mayor Lushkov, for example, in Moscow,
by other forces in the Russian Duma,
not just Vladimir Zhirinovsky and others,
but really serious, kind of what we would call here,
like right-wing nationalist forces.
But it's pervasive in the system,
and it's especially pervasive in the KGB
and in the security sector.
And that's where Putin comes out of.
Remember Putin also was of the opinion
that one of the biggest mistakes the Bolsheviks made
was getting rid of the Orthodox Church
as an instrument of the state.
And so there's this kind of restorationist wing
within the security services and the state apparatus
that want to kind of bring back Russian Orthodoxy
as a state instrument, an instrument of state power.
And they were kind of looking all the time
about strengthening the state,
the executive, the presidency.
And so it's everybody who takes part in that.
And it's also others who want power, honestly,
and they see Putin as their vehicle for power.
I think people like Sergei Kiryanko,
I knew Kiryanko back in the '90s.
I mean, my God, that guy's all in.
Or like Dmitry Medvedev,
you know, who was a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin,
certainly had a totally different perspective,
wasn't in the KGB.
- Did you say warmer, fuzzier version?
- A warmer, fuzzier version, yeah.
I mean, he's kind of like,
he was literally a warm personality.
I don't know if you watched him
during the September 30th annexation,
the guy had all kinds of facial twitches
and looked so rigid and stiff
that he looks like he might implode.
I mean, that wasn't how he was earlier in his career.
And he had a different view of Perestroika.
We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia
during Perestroika, he was in Dresden,
watching the East German state fall apart.
And dealing with the Stasi
and in a kind of place where
you weren't getting a lot of information
about what was happening in West Germany
or even what was happening back home in Perestroika.
And he has that kind of group of people around him,
the Patrushevs and Botnikovs and others,
and Sergei Ivanov and others,
from the different configurations of his administration,
who have come out of that same kind of mindset
and are kind of wanting to put everything
back together again.
So there's a lot of enablers,
there's a lot of power seekers,
and there are a lot of people who
think the same as him as well.
He is a man of his times, a man of his context.
- You as a top advisor yourself and a scholar of Putin,
do you think, actually now in his inner circle,
are there people he trusts?
- There are people he trusts for some things,
but I don't think there's people he trusts for everything.
I don't think he's the kind of person
who tells anyone everything at all.
I don't think he's got somebody who deeply confides in.
No, I think he compartmentalizes things.
He's often said that the only person he trusts is himself.
And I think that's probably true.
He's the kind of person who keeps his own counsel.
I mean, people talk about Kovalchuk, for example,
or some of the other people who are friends with him
that go back to his time in St. Petersburg.
At various points, he seemed to spend a lot of time,
way back when, talking to people who are,
people think of kind of more moderating forces
like Alexei Kudrin,
but doesn't seem to be interacting with them.
There are obviously aspects of his personal life.
Does he speak to his daughters?
Does he speak to kind of lovers,
kind of in a way people speculate about,
who might he confide in?
But I would greatly doubt
that he would have deep political discussions with them.
He's a very guarded, very careful person.
- What about sources of information then?
So trust a deep understanding about military strategies
for certain conflicts, like the war in Ukraine,
or even special subsets of the war in Ukraine,
or any kind of military operations,
getting clear information?
- I think he's deeply suspicious of people
and of information.
And I think part of the problems
that we see with Putin now,
I mean, I've come from isolation during COVID.
I'm really convinced that, like many of us,
a lot of Putin's views have hardened.
And the way that he looks at the world
have been shadowed in very dark ways
by the experience of this pandemic.
Obviously, he was in a bubble,
different kind of bubble from most of us.
I mean, most of us are not in bubbles
with multiple kind of palaces and kind of the Kremlin.
But we've seen so much,
obviously a lot of this is staged, that isolation,
or they're kind of making it very clear
that he's the czar,
the guy who is in charge, making all the decisions,
one end of the table and everybody else is at the other end.
But it's very difficult then to bring information to him
in that way.
He used to have a lot of information bundled for him
in the old days by the presidential administration.
I mean, I know that because it was a lot more open
in the past.
And I've had a lot of meetings
with people in the presidential administration
who brought outside,
would say all source information for him,
kind of funneled in information from different think tanks
and different viewpoints
and maybe a kind of more eclectic,
diversified set of information.
He would meet with people.
You've heard all the stories
about where he had once called up Masha Gessen
and had to come in.
Obviously, a very different character
as a journalist and a critic.
§16Transcript · 1:55:52–2:02:47
We've heard about Benediktor from Ekho Moskvy,
the radio program, the editor,
who Putin would talk to and consult with.
He'd reach out.
People like Lyudmila Alexeeva, for example,
the head of Memorial, he had some respect for her
and would sometimes just talk to her, for example.
All of that seems to have come to a halt.
- Can you explain why?
- I think a lot of us worry,
I mean, us who watch Putin,
about what kind of information is he getting?
Is it just information that he's seeking
and gathering himself
that fits into his worldview and his framework?
We're all guilty of that, of looking for things.
It gets to our social media preferences.
Are people just bringing to him things
that they think he wants to hear?
Like the algorithm,
kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard.
Or is he himself tapping into a source of information
that he absolutely wants?
And remember, he is not a military guy.
He's an operative and he was sort of trained in operations
and contingency planning.
Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister,
as a civil engineer,
was the former minister of emergencies.
He wasn't a military planner.
You know, somebody like Gerasimov,
the head of the chiefs of staff,
maybe a military guy, in this case, from the army,
but he's also somebody who's in a different part,
the chain of command.
He's not somebody who would spontaneously start
telling Putin things.
And Putin comes out of the FSB,
out of the KGB of the Soviet era,
and he knows the way that intelligence
get filtered and works.
He's probably somebody who wants
to consume raw intelligence.
He doesn't probably want to hear anybody else's analysis.
And he's thrived in the past of picking things up from people.
You know, I've taken part in all of these meetings
with him, gone for hours,
'cause he's just collecting.
He's collecting information.
He's sussing people out.
He wants to know the questions they ask.
He learns something about the questions that people ask,
the way that they ask them.
You know, so he's kind of soliciting information himself.
And if he's cut off from that information,
you know, because of circumstances,
then, you know, how is he formulating things in his head?
And again, getting into, you can't get into his head,
but you can understand the context in which he's operating.
And that's where you worry,
because he clearly made this decision to invade Ukraine
behind the back of most of his security establishment.
- You think so?
- Oh, I think it's pretty apparent.
- Oh, what, what would the security establishment,
what would be the--
- Well, that would be the larger, you know,
thinking of the funneling in information
from the presidential administration,
from the National Security Council.
It looks like, you know,
he made that decision with a handful of people.
And then, you know,
having worked in these kinds of environments,
and it's not that dissimilar,
you filter information up.
So think about, you know,
you and I are talking for hours here.
If you were my, you know, basically,
you know, senior official, and I'm your briefer,
I might only get 20 minutes with you.
And you might be just like, you know,
looking at your watch the whole time and thinking,
hang on a second, I've got to go,
and I've got this meeting, and I've got that meeting.
And yeah, your point, you're not going to wait there.
So I give this long explanation,
I've got to get to the point.
And then I've got to then choose for myself,
what's the information I'm going to impart to you?
Out of the 20 things that I think are important,
you know, okay, I've got 20 minutes,
maybe I only get two minutes.
Maybe, you know, you get called out,
and somebody, you know, kind of interrupts,
something happens, I'm going to get one minute, two minutes.
I mean, I once remember,
I had to give a presentation when I was in government.
- It's too real.
- You know, to Henry Kissinger,
you know, for that defense policy board.
And we planned bloody weeks on this thing.
You know, PowerPoints were created,
teams of people were brought together.
And, you know, people were practicing this,
we had all these, you know, different people there.
And I said, look, Henry Kissinger's an academic
and a former professor, and, you know,
I happened to, you know, I've got to watch him in action.
He's going to like, you know, five seconds in,
if we're lucky we get that far,
ask us a question,
and just throw off our entire presentation.
What is it that we want to convey?
And that's exactly what happened.
And then, you know, people aren't really prepared
what they wanted to convey.
And they, you know, they prepared a, you know,
a nice sort of fulsome, you know, PowerPoint-like approach.
We never even got there.
And so God knows what, you know,
he took away from it at the end of it.
And that's, you know, think about Putin.
He's going to be kind of impatient.
He's, you know, we see the televised things where he,
you know, kind of sits at a table a bit like, you know,
people won't necessarily see us here.
And he puts his hands on the table
and he looks across at the person and he says,
"So, tell me, you know,
what's the main things I need to know?"
And of course the person's mind probably goes blank,
you know, with the kind of the thought of like,
oh God, what's the main thing?
And they go, and they start,
well, Vladimir Vladimirovich.
And, you know, they start the kind of, you know,
they're revving up, you know, to get to the point,
and then he cuts them off.
So you think about that,
and then you think about,
well, what information has he got?
And then how does he process it?
And is he suspicious of it?
Does he not believe it?
And what inside of his own history then, you know,
leads him to make one judgment over another?
He clearly thought the Ukrainians
would fall apart in five seconds.
- We don't know if he clearly thought that,
but that there was a high probability maybe?
I mean, you can guess.
- I think he pretty much thought it,
because I think he thought that, you know,
kind of his Zelensky wasn't very popular.
There was an awful lot of, you know, pro-Russian sentiment
in whatever way he thinks that is,
because people are Russian speakers,
and that, you know, they're kind of, you know,
in polling, you know, they expressed affinity with Russia.
I mean, certainly in Crimea,
that worked out because a majority of the population
had, you know, higher sentiments
or feelings of affinity with Russia.
And, you know, obviously, you know,
that kind of, they got traction there.
But it's more complicated.
We talked about Donbass before,
about being a kind of melting pot,
when, you know, they tried the same thing in Donbass,
Donetsk and Luhansk,
'cause they tried in Crimea in 2014,
it didn't kind of pan out.
In fact, you know, a whole war broke out.
They tried, you know, to kind of in,
you know, many of the major cities
that are now under attack, including Odessa,
to kind of foment, you know, pro-Russian movements,
and they completely and utterly fell apart.
So Putin was thinking,
you know, I'm pretty sure based on polling
and the FSB having infiltrated, you know,
an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchies
we're now seeing is quite apparent
with some of the dismissals in Ukraine.
He was pretty sure that, you know,
kind of he would get traction,
and that it would be like 1956 in Hungary
or 1968 in Czechoslovakia.
Remember, he comes out of the Andropov levy,
as it's called, the kind of cohort of people
who come into the KGB under Yuri Andropov,
and Yuri Andropov has presided
over a lot of these anti-dissident,
you know, kind of movements inside of Russia itself
and how you suppress opposition,
but also over, you know, how you deal with,
you know, kind of the uprisings in,
you know, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
And there's all these lessons from this that,
§17Transcript · 2:02:49–2:11:00
you know, you can put everything back in the box.
And yeah, there might be a bit of violence
and a bit of fighting, but ultimately,
you think you've got the political figures
and you decapitate the opposition.
So they thought Zelensky would run away,
Yadokovich ran away, but, you know,
that was kind of a bit, you know,
sort of a different set of circumstances.
And they thought that all of the local governments
would, you know, kind of capitulate
because they had enough Russians
and inverted commas in there.
Again, mistaking language and, you know,
kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity
or how people would react in the time
and not understanding people's, you know,
linkages and, you know, kind of importance of place,
the way that people feel about who they are
in a certain set of circumstances and place.
- But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022
is unlike anything that he was ever involved with.
- I don't think he thought it would be, you know,
because it's this kind of, if he looks back into the past,
you're right though, he wasn't involved in '68 or '56
or what happened in the 1980s in Poland.
- But there's a very wide front and it's the capital.
And I mean, this isn't going for-
- This isn't Chechnya or this isn't, you know,
kind of Syria or, for example, yeah.
- This is a major nation.
- Exactly.
- Like a large, it's large, the size.
- It was more like Afghanistan,
but they didn't realize that because again,
Ukrainians are us.
There's this kind of inability to think
that people might think differently
and might want something different.
And that 30 years of independence
actually has an impact on people and their psyches.
And if I look back to the 1990s,
I mean, I remember being in seminars
and at Harvard at the time,
and we were doing a lot of research on, you know,
what was happening in, you know,
the former Soviet Union at the time,
because the early 1990s,
just after the, you know, the whole place fell apart.
And there was already under Yeltsin,
this kind of idea of Russians abroad,
Russians in the near abroad, Russian speakers,
and the need to bring them back in.
And I remember, you know, we had seminars at the time
where we talked about at some point,
there'd be some people in Russia
that would actually believe that
those Russian speakers needed to be brought back into Russia,
but that the people who spoke Russian might have moved on
because they suddenly had other opportunities
and other windows on the world.
I mean, look what's happened in Scotland.
You know, for example, most people in Scotland speak English.
The Scottish language is not the standard bearer
of Scottish identity.
There's just, it's almost a civic identity,
different identity than not just national identity,
just like you see in Ukraine.
And there's lots of English people
that have moved to Scotland
and now think of themselves as Scottish,
or Brazilians or Italians,
and, you know, all kinds of people who've moved in there.
I mean, it's a smaller population,
obviously, and it's not the scale of Ukraine,
but, you know, people feel differently.
And there's been a devolution of power.
And when Brexit happened, you know,
Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all.
They wanted to kind of still be, you know,
having a window on Europe.
And that's kind of historic.
And lots of people in Ukraine have looked West, not East.
You know, it depends on where you are,
not just in Lviv, you know, or somewhere like that,
but also in Kiev.
And Kharkiv, you know,
was kind of predominantly a Russian-speaking city,
but Kharkiv was also the center of Ukrainian culture
and Ukrainian literature, you know, at different points.
People have different views.
I grew up in the North of England.
We don't feel like the South of England.
There's been a massive divide
between North and South in England for millennia,
not just centuries.
So, you know, people feel differently
depending on where they live and, you know,
kind of where they grew up.
And Putin just didn't see that.
He didn't see that.
- Well, hold on a second.
Let me sort of push back at the fact
that I don't think any of this is obvious.
So first of all, Zelensky before the war was unpopular.
- Oh, he was, what was it, 38%, something like that?
But best in the popularity, yeah.
- Let me sort of make the case
that the calculation here is very difficult.
If you were to poll every citizen of Ukraine
and ask them, "What do you think happens if Russia invades?"
Just like, actually, put each individual Ukrainian
in a one-on-one meeting with Putin
and say, "What do you think happens?"
I honestly think most of them will say,
they will agree with the prediction
that the government will flee, it would collapse,
and the country won't unite around the cause
because of the factions,
because of all the different parties involved,
because of the unpopularity of the president.
- You might have said the same thing about the Soviet Union
when Hitler invaded in 1941.
- You see, the problem is Putin always reads history
from one perspective over another.
I think most countries basically rise to their own defense.
So this is actually one of the first times
that Russia has been on the offensive
rather than on the defensive.
So there's kind of a bit of a flip there.
I mean, obviously Afghanistan,
but that was more complicated
'cause it was also supposed to be an intervention, right?
I mean, it wasn't supposed to be to annex Afghanistan.
It was to try to prop up,
kind of a reinstall a leader there.
Syria, you were in there to help your guy, Bashar al-Assad,
turn away the opposition.
Chechnya was a debacle.
The Chechens fought back big time.
And it was only by dint of horrible, violent persistence
and ruthlessness and nasty, dirty tricks
that Putin prevailed there.
But then you wonder, did he prevail?
Because what happened?
Chechnya sometimes describes the most independent part
of the Russian Federation.
And Ramzan Kadyrov plays power games in Moscow.
Yeah, his predecessors,
even his father and others wouldn't have done that.
Ahmed Kadyrov, and before that, Dudayev and Maskhadov.
I mean, they were willing to make a compromise,
but they wouldn't have had the same position
that Kadyrov has had.
So, I think that, again, it's your perspective
and where you stand and which bit of history
you start to read.
And that's why I said that, I think Putin,
it's again, it's the information,
the way that he processes it.
I think most Russians also can't believe
that they've done something wrong in Ukraine.
I mean, maybe at this point things are changing a bit,
but that's why there was so much kind of support for this
in a right way.
I mean, I have Russian friends again,
I said, but look what was happening in Donetsk.
Look what was the Ukrainians were doing to our guys.
Look what was happening to Russian speakers.
We were defenders.
We were not, we're not invaders.
I think, again, the special military operation idea.
Now I think it's flipping, obviously,
in the way that with the war going on there.
But Putin wasn't kind of looking at what would happen.
I mean, most of the kind of glory parts of Russian history,
when you kind of go in,
you chase Napoleon back to Paris,
or you chase the Germans back to Berlin,
you put the flag above the Reichstag.
That's a very different set of affairs.
When you've been fighting a defensive one,
you've been invaded from a war where you invade someone else.
And even the most fractured populations,
like you had in the Soviet Union at the point,
rally around and, you know, World War I, that fell apart.
I mean, the Tsar didn't manage to rally everybody around.
I mean, the whole thing fell apart.
And World War II, Stalin had to, you know, revive nationalism,
including in the republics in Central Asia and elsewhere,
to revive nationalism.
And Ukraine suddenly found nationalism,
you know, in a kind of sense of--
- That's really interesting, because it's not obvious,
especially what Ukrainians went through in the 1930s.
It's not obvious that that, I mean,
my grandfather was Ukrainian,
and he was proud to fight a Ukrainian Jew.
He was proud to fight and willing to die for his country.
It wasn't like--
§18Transcript · 2:11:01–2:18:49
- His country then was the Soviet Union.
- The Soviet Union, right.
Sorry, to clarify.
- But he might fight now for his country, Ukraine.
- Yes, but I'm just like lingering on the point you made.
It was not obvious that that united feeling would be there.
- No, and again, it wouldn't have been obvious
with the Soviet Union.
- That's what, sorry.
- Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
- Sorry, I was referring to my grandfather
with the Soviet Union.
We're both saying the exact same thing.
- Yeah, we know, yeah, we are.
We're saying the same thing. - You're saying it's a really
powerful thing, 'cause I take it,
'cause you take history as it happened,
you don't realize it could have happened differently.
It's kind of, it's fascinating.
- It's that whole counterfactual, right?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Because I mean, if you've kind of,
that's why we all need in the United States
to really examine our own history,
because, you know, there's a lot of lessons from that,
that we should treat very cautiously.
It doesn't mean that history repeats or even rhymes,
you know, it's the old axiom all the time,
but there are a lot of things
that you can take away differently
from putting a different perspective
in a different slant on the same set of events.
I mean, I always used to wonder, like,
how many books can be written on the French Revolution,
or even on the Russian Revolution?
You know, I studied with Richard Pipes.
I remember he was really offended
after he'd written his great "Magnus Opus"
on the Russian Revolution, two volumes,
that other people would, you know,
kind of write about the Russian Revolution.
He said, "I've written it all."
And I thought, well, actually, maybe you haven't.
It's like, that might be some completely different angle there
that you haven't really thought of, and that's Putin.
You know, I remember Peskov saying,
"Putin reads history all the time, Russian history,"
and I thought, well, maybe he should read some world history.
You know, maybe he should, you know,
kind of read some European authors on Russian history,
not just, you know, reading Lamanossa for, you know,
Russian historians on Russian history,
because you might see something
from a very different perspective.
And look, in the United States,
the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam, right?
I mean, they saw Vietnam as kind of weak,
manipulated by, you know, kind of external forces,
China, Soviet Union,
but the Vietnamese fought for their own country.
They suddenly became Vietnamese,
and Ho Chi Minh became, you know,
kind of basically a kind of a wartime fighter and leader,
you know, in a way that, you know,
perhaps people wouldn't have understood either.
- You said the United States
made a massive mistake in Vietnam,
and that, for some reason, sprung a thought in my head.
Has the United States, since World War II,
had anything that's not a mistake
in terms of military operations abroad?
I suppose all the ones that are successes,
we don't even know about, probably,
so it's like very fast military operations.
- I mean, Korea's divided.
I mean, I don't know if it's successful,
but, you know, kind of, I mean,
there was a solution found that, you know,
some people are promoting, you know,
in this case as well, of a sort of division,
and, you know, the DMZ, and, you know,
one side over the other,
and, you know, kind of perpetuating a division,
which I think is particularly successful.
But if you think about World War I and World War II,
the United States came in, you know,
under some very specific sets of circumstances.
In World War I, they did kind of come in
to help, you know, kind of liberate, you know,
parts of Europe, France, and, you know,
kind of the UK, and, you know, everything else,
Great Britain, and the war towards the end of it.
World War II, you know, there was that whole debate
about whether the United States
should even be part of the war.
I mean, we know it wasn't thought to, you know,
overturn the Holocaust, and all of the kind of things
you'd kind of wish it would have been fought for,
but it was because of Pearl Harbor,
and, you know, the Japanese pulling in.
But, I mean, ultimately, it was easy to explain
why you were there, you know,
particularly after Pearl Harbor and what had happened.
It was harder to explain Vietnam and Korea,
and, you know, many of the other wars,
and that's kind of going to be a problem for Putin,
and that's why there is a problem for Putin.
All of his explanations have been questioned,
you know, sort of off on NATO, or this,
or that, or the other, and, you know,
kind of liberating, you know, Ukraine from Nazis,
or, you know, kind of basically stopping
the persecution of Russian speakers,
and all of this has now got lost
in just this horrific destruction.
And that's what happened in Vietnam, as well.
It became, you know, a great degradation
of the Russian military, with atrocities
and people wondering why on earth
the United States was in Vietnam.
I mean, even that kind of happened in Britain
in their colonial, you know, kind of period, as well.
Why was the United Kingdom doing, you know,
committing atrocities and, you know,
kind of basically fighting these colonial wars?
Northern Ireland, why was the United Kingdom
still, you know, kind of militarily occupying Ireland?
Cyprus, there's all kinds of, you know,
instances where we look at this thing,
because what Russia is doing now,
Putin is trying to occupy another country,
irrespective of, you know, kind of the historical linkages,
and, you know, the kind of the larger meta-narratives
that he's trying to put forward there.
- What role did the United States play
in the lead-up and the actual invasion
of Ukraine by Russia?
A lot of people say that, I mean,
obviously Vladimir Putin says that part of the reason
the invasion had to happen is because of security concerns
over the expansion of NATO,
and there is a lot of people that say
that this was provoked by NATO.
Do you think there's some legitimacy to that case?
- Look, I think the whole situation here
is very complicated, and you have to take
a much longer view than, you know,
what happened in, you know, 2008
with the opened door for Ukraine and Georgia,
which actually, by the way,
I thought was a strategic blunder, just to be very clear,
because there wasn't any kind of thinking through
about what the implications of that would be,
and, you know, what it actually would mean
for Ukraine's security, and also bearing in mind
what, you know, Putin had already said
about NATO expansion, they came on the wake
of the recognition by the United States
pretty unilaterally of Kosovo,
and it also comes in the wake,
as I mentioned before, the invasion of Iraq,
which really is very important
for understanding Putin's psyche.
So I think, you know, we have to go back,
you know, much further than it's not just talking
about kind of NATO and what that means.
NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine
going in a different direction from Russia,
just as so is the European Union.
Remember, the annexation of Crimea comes after Ukraine
has sought an association agreement
with the European Union, not with NATO
at that particular point, even though, you know,
the EU on the security, common security and defence policy
basically has all kinds of connections with NATO,
you know, various different levels
in the European security front.
It was all about Europe, and going on a different economic
and political and ultimately legal path,
because if you have an association agreement,
eventually you get into the acquis communitaire,
and it just transforms the country completely,
and Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet period
or the Russian Empire period.
It becomes, you know, on a different trajectory
like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, you know,
another country, it becomes a different place.
It moves into a different space, and that's part of it.
But if you go back again to the period
at the very beginning of the 1990s,
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
where there's no discussion about NATO at that point
and NATO enlargement, there was a lot of pressure again,
as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine,
trying to bring it back in the fold,
and wanting to make what was then, you know,
this mechanism for divorce, more of a mechanism
for re-managed Commonwealth of Independent States.
And in the early 1990s, when Ukraine
became an independent state, it inherited
§19Transcript · 2:18:51–2:26:34
that nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union.
Basically, whatever was stationed or positioned
in Ukrainian territory at the time became Ukraine's,
strategic and, you know, kind of basically intermediate
and tactical nuclear weapons.
And, you know, in the United States at the time,
you know, we had all this panic about
what was gonna happen with all of that.
So, I mean, I think, you know, as a scientist
and, you know, kind of technically,
it would have been difficult for Ukraine to actually use this.
I mean, the targeting was, you know, done centrally.
They were actually stationed there, but nonetheless,
Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan,
suddenly became nuclear powers.
And, you know, Ash Carter, the former US defense secretary
who's just died tragically, and Dave was talking about,
you know, talking together today,
was part of a whole team of Americans and others who,
you know, tried to work with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan
to get them to give up the nuclear weapons.
And back in the early period of that, '93, '94,
you go back, and I mean, I was writing about this
at the time, I wrote a report called
"Back in the USSR," which is, you know,
kind of on the website of the Kennedy School
with some other colleagues.
And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations
coming out of Moscow, the defense ministry
and the Duma, the parliament and others,
that Ukraine was trying to find a way of making a dirty bomb,
using its nuclear weapons, you know, becoming a menace,
and, you know, kind of Ukraine
might have to be brought to order.
So a lot of the dynamics we're seeing now
were happening then, irrespective of NATO.
Basically, the problem was always Ukraine getting away.
Yeltsin himself, when he unraveled the Soviet Union,
didn't really want it to unravel,
but he didn't have the wherewithal to bring,
you know, the countries back again.
Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Its economy imploded.
It had to give sovereignty to all of these
constituent parts of the Russian Federation
in terms of a sort of devolution of authority.
It had the war in Chechnya,
which Yeltsin stupidly sparked off in 1994.
You had Tatarstan, one of the regions,
the all-rich regions, you know,
basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow.
You had the whole place was kind of seemed like
it was falling apart so that, you know,
you couldn't do anything on Ukraine
because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it.
And then when, you know, kind of basically Russia
starts to get its act back together again,
all of these security nationalist types
who had never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova
or anywhere else to kind of move away,
they didn't worry that much about Central Asia, to be frank,
but they did want, you know,
the core states in their view to come back.
And Moldova was part of that, even if it's not Slavic.
But, you know, they wanted Belarus and northern Kazakhstan
and probably Kazakhstan as well,
which wasn't really thought about being part of Central Asia,
back in the fold as close as possible.
So anything that gave those countries an alternative
was seen as negative.
And it could have been an association with China,
you know, of them joining, you know,
kind of an association with Latin America or Africa
or something else like that.
But of course, NATO has all of those larger connotations
of it being, you know, the Cold War opposing entity.
And Putin has always seen NATO
as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact,
which is, in other words,
just something dominated completely by the United States.
Now, that, of course, is why getting back to Trump again,
Trump was always going, you know, to the Europeans,
if this is really supposed to be collective security
and a mutual defense pact, why are you guys not paying?
You know, why does the United States pay for everything?
But, you know, NATO was actually conceived
as collective defense, you know, mutual security.
And it was set up by, you know, the United States,
along with the UK and France and, you know,
Germany and Turkey and, you know, other countries.
And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden.
They didn't have to join NATO.
They didn't want to join NATO for a long time.
They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel
and the other countries partner with NATO.
But once they thought that their security was really at risk,
they wanted to be part of it.
And so, you know, kind of, you're now really seeing,
you know, that NATO was something other than just being,
you know, a creature or an instrument of the United States.
But that's how Putin always saw it.
So, you know, what this debate about NATO is all about,
or Russia being provoked,
is wanting to kind of return to an old superpower,
bipolar relationship, where everything is negotiated
with the United States.
It's to try to deny that Ukraine or Belarus,
well, Belarus has kind of been absorbed by this point,
you know, by Russia or Moldova or Kazakhstan
or any of the other countries have any kind of agency,
not even Poland or Hungary or, you know,
kind of France and Britain.
For years and years and years,
senior people like Putin and people around the Kremlin
have demanded a return to the kind of what they call
the old concert of Europe or the concert of Vienna,
where the big guys,
which now means the United States and Russia,
just sit down and thrash everything out.
And so, I mean, Putin by saying,
"Look, it was provoked.
It's the United States, it's NATO.
It's a proxy war, or it's this or it's that,
or this is gonna be a nuclear confrontation.
It's like the Cuban missile crisis
or it's the Euromissile crisis."
It's basically just saying, you know,
"I want to go back to when the Soviet Union
and the United States worked things out.
I want to go back to the whole, you know,
period of the 1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan
just kind of got together and figured things out."
Or, even better, back to Yalta, Potsdam, and Tehran
and the big, you know, meetings at the end of World War II
where we resolved the whole future security.
We've had a war, we've had the Cold War.
Now we've got another war.
We've got a real war, a hot war.
We've got a war in Ukraine.
It should be the United States and Russia
that sort this out."
So this is where we see the United States
waffling about as well,
trying to kind of like figure out how to handle this
because it has to be handled in a way
that Ukraine has agency.
Because if Ukraine doesn't have agency,
nobody else has agency either.
Nobody else has any kind of decision-making power.
And, you know, we have an environment
in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players.
There's the United States and Russia and China.
And maybe occasionally it might be India
and perhaps Brazil or some other,
South Africa or some other country,
like maybe the BRICS at some point.
But, you know, ultimately it's like the old days,
big powers resolve everything.
And so this war is also about Russia's right, Putin's right,
you know, to determine things,
you know, strong man to strong man,
big country to big country,
and, you know, determine, you know,
where things happen next.
That's why he's talking about things being provoked
and it's being the United States' fault.
- But aren't there parts of the United States establishment
that likes that kind of three-party view of the world?
- Oh, there's always going to be people
who like that part, that approach.
Of course there is.
But then they don't necessarily dominate.
That's the kind of thing that people kind of think about.
I mean, you know, Putin can, you know,
read, you know, all the various articles
and hear the kind of pronouncements of people.
But, you know, this gets back to, you know,
the way that the United States operates.
You know, Putin saw that, you know,
Trump wanted to have a, you know,
top-down, you know, vertical of power.
And other presidents have wanted to have that.
But the United States is a pretty messy place.
And we have all kinds of different viewpoints.
Now, of course, we know that in Russia,
everything, even criticism of the Kremlin
is usually fairly orchestrated,
usually to kind of flesh out, you know,
what people think about things.
When we had these hardliners saying, you know,
we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less,
and that, you know, the army wasn't doing enough,
it was in many respects, you know,
kind of encouraged by the Kremlin
and to see how people would react to that.
You know, to kind of actually create a constituency
for, you know, being more ruthless
than you had before because, you know,
they wanted to clamp down.
In the United States, I mean, I can say whatever I want.
§20Transcript · 2:26:37–2:34:18
It doesn't mean that I'm speaking
on behalf of the White House.
And, you know, even if I have been an advisor
to this president, that president, and the other,
it doesn't mean I'm, you know,
basically speaking on behalf of the US government.
But there's kind of always an assumption from the Russians
that, you know, when people, you know, say this
and people do advocate one thing over another,
that they're, you know, it's operating,
there's a lot of mirror imaging,
thinking that, you know, we're operating
in the same kind of way.
So yes, there are, of course, constituencies
who think like that and would love it.
You know, to go back to that,
and there are many people out there
with their own peace plans.
All kinds of people, you know, out there
trying to push this. - Yeah, but there does seem
to be the engine of the military-industrial complex
seems to give some fuel to the hawks
and they seem to create momentum in government.
- Yeah, but other people do too.
I mean, there's always, you know,
kind of a checksum in again.
- You believe in the tension of ideas.
- I think there is a lot of tension.
I mean, I've seen it.
I've seen it inside of the government now, you know,
and people can push back and that's why I speak out
and I try to lay it out so that everybody can,
you know, kind of figure it out for themselves.
I said the same to you as I say to everybody.
This is how I see the situation.
And, you know, this is, you know,
how we can analyze it here.
Now, look, do I think that we've handled, you know,
the whole Russia account, you know, for years?
Well, no, we haven't.
I mean, we've taken our eyes off the ball many times.
We've failed to understand the way
that people like Putin think.
You know, you talked earlier about, you know,
we need to have empathy for, you know,
all the people who like Trump or like Biden
and somehow they think we've got to have
strategic empathy about Putin as well.
We've got to understand how the guy thinks
and why he thinks like he does.
You know, he has got his own context
and his own frame and his own rationale.
And he is rational.
He is a rational actor in his own context.
And we've got to understand that.
We've got to understand that he would take offense
at something and he would take action over something.
It doesn't mean to say that, you know,
we are necessarily to blame by taking actions,
but we are to blame when we don't understand
the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly
or, you know, take preventative action
or recognize that something might happen
as a result of something.
- So you've been in the room with Putin.
Let me ask you for some advice.
And it's also just a good philosophical question
for you or for me.
If I have a conversation with Vladimir Putin right now,
can you advise on what questions, topics,
ideas to talk through to him as a leader,
to him as a human?
What would you like to understand about his mind,
about his thinking?
- Yeah, remember what I said before
that Putin always tries to, you know, reverse things.
He wants to hear the questions that people have.
Because remember, he himself at different points
has been a recruiter, which is, you know,
the way that you're operating now as well, right?
You're asking an awful lot of questions.
Your questions also betray, you know,
often the times where you're thinking about things,
you know, the kind of context.
You know, kind of any kind of dialogue like this
reveals a lot about the, you know, the other person.
And I've actually often, you know,
noticed in these settings that Putin likes
to have a lot of give and take.
So I think he would actually enjoy having a conversation,
you know, with you.
But again, he would always be trying to influence you,
inform and influence.
That's kind of, you know,
part of the way that he always operates.
So what you would have to, you know,
be trying to think about,
so what is it you would want to elicit information from him?
You're trying to understand the guy's worldview.
And what we're trying to also understand
is if there's any room there
where he might compromise on something.
You know, so if your goal was to go in there,
you know, to talk about Ukraine at this particular moment,
I mean, one of the problems that I've often seen
in the sort of the meetings we've had with Putin
just ends up in sort of mutual recriminations.
You know, kind of, no, well, what about what you've done?
Or no, you've done that about, you know,
and there's always this whataboutism.
I mean, it often say, well,
you're saying that I've done this, but you've done that.
The United States invaded Iraq.
What's the difference between, you know,
what I'm doing and all of the things
that you've been doing here?
I mean, what you would have to try to do
is kind of elicit information about why,
or what he is thinking about this particular moment in time
and why he thinks it.
- Yeah, the whataboutism is a failure case.
I think that shows from all the interviews I've seen
that with him, that just shows that he doesn't trust
the person on the other side.
- No, he doesn't.
- Right, but I'm not cynical like people
because they seem to think he's some kind of KGB agent
that doesn't trust anybody.
I disagree.
I think everybody's human.
And from my perspective, I'm worried about what I've seen
is I think whether it's COVID,
whether it's other aspects that I'm not aware of
leading up to the invasion,
he seems to be less willing to have
charismatic back and forth dialogue.
- Yeah, an open discussion.
Actually, I said, you asked me before
about that issue of trust,
and he often says he only trusts himself.
And I said, he's often distrustful of people,
but he does trust some people for certain things
where he knows it's within their competence.
So he has people he trusts to do things
'cause he knows they'll do them
and he knows that they'll do them well,
which is why he has his old buddies from St. Petersburg
'cause he's known them for a very long time
and he knows that they won't try to pull a fast one over him,
but he also knows their strengths and their weaknesses
and what they can be trusted to do.
I mean, he's learning that some of the people in the military
that he thought were competent
or people on other things are not, right?
And he tends to actually have a lot of loyalty
to people as well.
Or he also kind of thinks it's best to keep them
inside the tent than outside.
And he moves them around.
He kind of, okay, he gives them multiple chances
to redeem themselves if they don't.
It's not like he has them done in.
I mean, yeah, there is a lot of that in the system,
but the people that he's worked with for a long time,
he moves them around to something else,
perhaps where they can do less harm.
Although we've often see that he has quite a small cadre
of people that he's reliant on
and they're not up to the task,
which is kind of what's happening here.
But he also, in the past, has been more straightforward,
just like he was saying here, more pragmatic.
And I think if you engaged with him in Russian,
well, you're actually literally speaking the same language
'cause there's so much lost in translation.
I used to jump outside of my skin
listening to some of the phone calls
because the way that they kind of relayed
with an interpreter--
- Oh, 'cause you're listening to the translation?
- No, 'cause I know I'm listening to the Russian
and the translation, which is happening in real time.
And having been at a translators' institute,
it's really difficult.
Look, an interpreter's a trend in the moment
to do something, the synchroni privo,
the synchronized or the real-time translation.
So translation is an art as well as a skill.
If you're doing simultaneous translation,
that's the word in English,
synchroni privo in Russian,
you're kind of focused in the moment
on the fragments of the discussion,
trying to render it as accurately as you possibly can.
And when you come out of that,
you can't relay the entire conversation.
And often, what translators do is they take
this little short-hand note like journalists do.
And afterwards, they've just been caught up in the moment
and they haven't got the big picture.
§21Transcript · 2:34:20–2:41:52
Consecutive translation is different.
Kind of you're trying to convey the whole mood
of big chunks of dialogue that have already been there.
But sometimes you might not get that right either.
And it breaks up the flow of the discussion.
- Right, it's terrible.
- And often, it's kind of the person who translates,
it's different.
Some of our best translators are women.
But hearing a woman's voice translating a guy
who has a particular guy's way of speaking,
and a macho way of speaking, and a crude way of speaking,
be that Putin, or I've seen that happen with Erdogan,
the president of Turkey,
and it gets translated by a much more refined female speaker,
you've just lost the whole thing.
And many of the translators on the Russian side
are not competent in English
in the way that you would hope they are.
It's not just that they're not native speakers,
they're just not trained to the same high standards
they used to be in the past.
And you lose the nuance, you lose the feel.
You almost need the interpretive actor
doing the interpretations.
You need to match it as much as you can
in the way that you do voiceovers in film.
The best way to talk to Putin
is one-on-one in his own language.
And I have a really great friend here
who is one of the best interpreters,
and Putin is often asked by the media to interpret for him.
He was at the Institute that I was at,
I mean, I know him from that kind of period.
And he is just excellent,
just like Pavel Polashenko was absolutely phenomenal
at interpreting Gorbachev.
Now, he didn't always interpret him accurately
'cause Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaffes,
and sometimes Gorbachev himself would joke
that Polashenko spoke better for Gorbachev
than Gorbachev could himself.
But Putin is actually quite precise
and careful in the way that he speaks
because there's a lot of menace sometimes
to things deliberately,
other times there's lots of humor,
and he's telling a joke for a particular reason.
And a lot of it is, I mean,
he actually uses the richness of the Russian language
and the crudity of language
that can't be conveyed in English.
- And also facial expressions that go along with it.
- Yeah, facial expressions, body language,
the way that he sits back in the chair and slouches,
the kind of the way that he makes fun of people
and he kind of uses irony.
Just some of it is just lost and it needs to be conveyed.
- The depth of humor and wit,
I've met quite a few political leaders like that
and they speak only Russian when I was traveling in Ukraine.
I don't know how you translate that.
I think it's almost,
the other person that reminds me like that a little bit
is Obama.
Obama had a wit and an intelligence,
but he would smile as he said something
that add a lot to it.
That he's trolling you or he's being sarcastic.
Me converting into words.
It's obvious that all English speakers,
if they listen to Obama,
but if you had to translate to a different language,
I think you're gonna lose a lot of that.
- Yeah, I mean, when I watched the,
I mean, I watched many of Putin's speeches,
just in Russian,
not looking at any of the subtitles or anything.
And it's just watching the way that his body language is
at the time when he's saying things,
the way that you smirk, he'll sneer,
he'll laugh, he'll ad lib,
kind of from something that obviously kind of,
wasn't there on the prepared speech.
And it's really critical.
And kind of a lot, some people speak,
like Trump, it's just needs kind of just words.
Putin, the words are very important.
Trump, it's the atmosphere.
It's the kind of the way you feel about things.
It's the buzz you get, it's revving people up.
It's the kind of slogans and Putin,
he's conveying a lot.
- And what he's saying there.
- But I think, I mean, of course I don't know much
'cause I only speak Russian and English,
but I have in English or Russian have not met
almost anyone ever as interesting in conversation as Putin.
I think he shines not in speeches,
but in interactions with others.
- Yeah, when you watch those interviews and things with him,
and I've been at many of these sessions,
it's been hours of him parrying questions.
And it's like watching a boxer sparring
in a kind of training bout.
Yeah, come on, give me another one.
You know, and it's kind of like, and he prides himself.
And he's made mistakes often,
but the breadth of the issues that he's often covered
has been fascinating.
And I used to just take, you know,
kind of really detailed notes about this
because you learn a ton.
But it's also about his worldview again.
I mean, he does live in a certain box, like we all do.
And, you know, again, his world experience
is not as extensive as, you know,
you would hope it would be.
But that's why you have to really pay attention.
That's where we've messed up.
That's where we haven't really paid a lot of attention
to what he's been saying.
He's been telegraphing this grievance,
this dissatisfaction, this,
I'm gonna do something for years.
- And the thing is during war time,
the combined with propaganda
and the narratives of resentment and grievance
that you dig in on those.
Like maybe you start out not believing it,
but you're sure it's all gonna believe it eventually.
- Well, you convince yourself over time.
Yeah, look, the longer you're in a position like Putin,
22 years now, coming from 23 years,
could be out there for 36 years.
You become more and more rigid.
I mean, this is, again, you know,
something that you see in history.
You know, you look at people through history
have moved from kind of being kind of left wing
and in their perspectives to hard right.
They kind of have a,
but kind of a sort of an ossification
or a rigidity emerges in their views.
I mean, again, I used to have these arguments
with Professor Pius about Lenin,
'cause he would talk about Lenin.
I said, "But he didn't change his mind from being 18.
"Have you not thought about that?"
I mean, it's like,
we're not formed, fully formed individuals at 18.
You know, we don't know anything.
We know something, but not everything.
I mean, obviously the younger context,
you know, the kind of the way that you kind of grow up,
the place you grew up,
the things that happened to you, the traumas you have.
I mean, all of these have an impact.
But then if you don't grow beyond all of that,
and Putin's been stuck in place since 2000,
when he became president.
He's not out and about, you know,
kind of being a man of the people.
You know, he's not doing the kind of things
that he used to do.
Yeah, he gets out there and he goes to Kazakhstan
and, you know, Tajikistan,
and he goes to China and he does this and that.
And then to COVID, he didn't go anywhere.
I mean, very few places.
And so he's got stuck.
And that worries me a lot,
because you could see before that he, you know,
had a bit more of flexibility of thought.
And that's why nobody should be in place forever.
You should always kind of like get out there
and go out there and learn a new skill.
You know, kind of, he needs some,
he needs to sort of, you know,
he needs to get out more and do something different.
- You had an interesting point you've made
that both Vladimir Zelensky and Putin
are thinking about, they're just politicians.
They're thinking about the 2024 election,
which is coming up for both of them.
- Yeah, I've said that in some of the other interviews.
Yeah, that's true.
- That's so interesting.
I mean, I--
- 'Cause their election's gonna be pretty much
at the same time.
- As the US election also.
- Oh, there's gonna be before.
I mean, 'cause it's sometime in that, you know,
early part of the year for the presidential election.
- Yeah, and also, I don't know if you know
about US elections,
but they actually last way longer than a year.
- We're in it now, aren't we?
You know, already.
§22Transcript · 2:41:53–2:49:07
- We're already starting.
So there's gonna be a significant overlap.
- Yeah, you know, you're right.
- Do you think that actually comes into play
in their calculus?
- I think it was one of the reasons
why Putin invaded in February of 2022,
'cause it was gonna be two years.
I mean, he thought it'd be over by March of 2022,
and he got two years to prepare for, you know, the election.
And he got a big boost, you know, not only,
he got a boost from Crimea.
I mean, I didn't mention that before.
I mean, one of the reasons for invading Crimea
and annexing or invading Ukraine the first time
and annexing Crimea was, look what happened to his ratings.
They went from kind of declining,
and they were still pretty good, you know,
by anybody's standards,
to just rocketing off into the stratosphere.
I mean, I didn't really meet anybody in Russia
who thought that annexing Crimea was, you know,
kind of a bad thing.
I mean, even, you know, kind of people who opposed Putin
on so many other things.
Crimea was, you know, "Krim nash," they kept saying.
You know, this is kind of, you know, we got it back.
You know, it should never have gone away.
It was ours, you know, but, you know, this is more complex.
And he wasn't, I don't think at the time,
planning on annexing all of Ukraine
when he went in this special military operation.
He was going to try to turn it into what Belarus has become,
you know, part of a, you know,
bring back the Commonwealth of Independent States
or the union, then a new union with Belarus and Ukraine
and Russia over time.
But certainly, you know, remove Ukraine as a major factor,
independent factor on the world stage,
and, you know, consolidate Crimea and maybe, you know,
kind of incorporate Donetsk and Luhansk, you know,
kind of that was also a possibility.
But it wasn't in his intention, in any case,
to have something on this kind of scale.
He wanted to get on with then preparing
for what was going to be, he would think,
the cakewalk, the shoe-in of the next presidential election.
I mean, last time around,
he had to invent a bit of competition
with this person who's reputed to be his goddaughter,
Ksenia Sobchak, you know, for a bit of, you know,
kind of entertainment for people.
This next time around, you know,
maybe he wasn't really planning on running, you know,
against any other, you know, serious opposition.
He was just going to have the acclaim of, you know,
the kind of the great leader, like President Xi in China.
You know, Putin, you know, was basically,
I think, you know, he also hoped that he would be able
to devolve some authority away, you know,
kind of so he's more like the, you know,
the supreme leader kind of figure,
the czar-like figure, the monarch.
And then, you know, other people get on
with the chief executive, prime ministerial,
running the country, and he could kind of, like,
step back and just enjoy this, you know,
maybe there was going to be, again,
a new union of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine,
in some, you know, fashion, and he could preside over that.
- So speaking of opposition,
you've criticized the famed Putin critic, Alexei Navalny.
What's the nature of your criticism?
- Well, it hasn't really been a kind of a criticism
in the way that, you know, people have implied,
but more just reminding people that Navalny
isn't some stooge of the West, as other people have,
you know, kind of depicted him in the Russian film,
but, you know, saying that this is kind of,
you know, he's pro-Western.
He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot.
You know, in the past, he's articulated, you know,
things are not so dissimilar
from some of the people around Putin.
And it's more just reminding people that, you know,
just because you kind of see somebody, you know,
as a kind of an opposition figure
or somebody who might be more palatable from, you know,
your perspective looking from the West,
they're not always going to be, you know,
what you think they are.
Alexei Navalny is a Russian,
and, you know, in a particular Russian context,
he's different from Putin,
but he wouldn't necessarily, you know,
kind of run, you know, the Russian system
in ways that we will like.
So that's kind of, it's not a kind of a criticism.
It's more of a critique of the way that we look at things.
You know, I think it's a mistake to always, you know,
say, "Oh, this is pro-Western," or, "This is a, you know,
liberal." I mean, what the heck does that mean, pro-Western?
I mean, he's a Russian.
He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot.
And he's often, you know, been, you know,
quite critical about immigration.
He's had some negative views about, you know,
from one point of view, he said, "Don't feed the Caucasus,"
you know, kind of played upon some of the, you know,
the racial and ethnic tensions inside of,
you know, Russia itself as well.
Now, he is a pluralist, you know, and he's kind of,
and he wants to have, you know,
a different set of political actors there,
but he also isn't promoting revolution.
He's not Lenin.
He's not wanting to bring down the state.
He wants to kind of, you know,
change the people who are in charge.
That's what he's being basically focused on.
And, you know, he might have,
and have things and do things that, you know,
we elsewhere might not like.
- And I guess the bigger picture there is,
it's not trivial to know that if you place another human
in power to replace the current human in power,
that things are going to be better.
They could be a lot worse.
Because there's a momentum to a system.
A system is bigger than just this leader,
even when that leader has a huge amount of power.
- That's absolutely right.
And, you know, he grew up in that, you know, same system.
Now he's younger than Putin,
so he's got a different generational perspective.
And he's not wedded to the Soviet Union,
or, you know, kind of some concept of the Russian empire.
He doesn't seem to spend a lot of time,
I don't know what he's doing, you know, in jail,
but he's probably not sitting around, you know,
reading Lomonosov and, you know,
kind of the great kind of tracts of Russian history.
Could be, actually.
But I mean, I think, you know,
Navalny has a different worldview
and a different perspective,
just like Medvedev was different, you know,
in his time in presidency and made some, you know,
changes and some innovations there.
But don't think that they're going to be
radically different.
Because look, Gorbachev, I mean,
he was so different from Andropov and Cherenko
and others as a person,
but he was also constrained by the system.
And he wanted to have change,
but he wanted evolutionary change.
He didn't know how to do it,
but he didn't want to bring the whole system down.
Look at Khrushchev.
When he came in, you know,
after that whole period of, you know,
everybody trying to figure out what to do
after Stalin had died and there was all this
kind of back and forth,
and eventually Khrushchev emerges.
And, you know, he tries to make changes to the system,
but he's also a creature of a very specific context.
He's grown up in the same system.
And he, you know, kind of brings
all kinds of elements of chaos there,
you know, to the whole thing.
And, you know, gets into a standoff with the United States,
that we know is the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and eventually, you know, gets removed.
You know, we're looking at what's happening
in the United Kingdom right now.
You know, they've just churned through three prime ministers
and actually five prime ministers in, you know,
kind of as many years,
but all of those prime ministers have come out
of the context of the Conservative Party.
They're all, you know, kind of just shades of,
you know, the same thing.
They've all come out of the same academic
and, you know, kind of privileged backgrounds.
Even Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister,
who's the first, you know, Indian or Anglo-Indian
prime minister in British history.
It was a kind of phenomenal, you know,
kind of as a child of Indian immigrants,
but also a person of great privilege
from the same academic and party background as the others.
You know, so there are always differences
with those human beings, but those contexts matter a lot.
- What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine
with a tactical nuclear weapon?
- Well, Putin's definitely been thinking about it, right?
I mean, he is the kind of person,
if he's got an instrument,
§23Transcript · 2:49:08–2:56:46
he wants to figure out how to use it.
You know, we look at polonium, we look at Novichok,
you know, we look at all kinds of things,
you know, that he's also presided over in Syria.
He has, you know, put in charge of the war in Ukraine now.
General Savrykin is known as General Armageddon,
you know, the kind of person who, you know,
pretty much facilitated the use of chemical weapons
in Syria, you know, for example.
So, you know, don't think that Putin, you know,
hasn't thought about how ruthless he can possibly be.
The question is really the calculation.
It's his estimation of the probability
that it will get the desired effect.
We keep talking about this idea of escalate to deescalate.
That's not what the Russians, you know, how they call it,
but it's the whole idea that you do something
really outrageous to get everybody else to back off.
Now, when you talked about the precedent
that the United States set
of detonating the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
what, you know, he obviously meant the precedent
of using nuclear weapons, of course,
which, of course, we would then say,
well, we showed them how the impermissibility
of ever doing that again.
But what he's talking about is the precedent
of escalating to such an extent that you stop the war,
because he reads that saying, well, you know,
the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The war was brought to a quick conclusion.
And of course, there's a huge debate in America
about whether it was necessary to do that,
whether the war was ending anyway.
Did that really, you know, kind of change the minds
of the Japanese high command?
I mean, there's all kinds of books
and being written about that.
And of course, you know, the revulsion that people felt
in the wake of that was just, you know,
just the shock of what actually happened.
And we've spent, you know, 70 years, you know,
basically coming to terms with the fact
that we did something like that.
You know, the firebombing, you know,
we've also looked at all the bombing, you know,
in Vietnam and everywhere.
And, you know, all these massive bombing campaigns
and realizing they actually often had the opposite effect.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have contributed
and there's a lot of, you know, scholarship suggesting
it did to the end of the war.
But all of the big bombing campaigns,
the destruction actually prolonged wars
because they made people fight back,
as we're kind of seeing in the case of Ukraine.
So Putin has to calculate the probability
that if he uses some tactical nuclear weapon,
that it will get the desired effect,
which is get us to capitulate and Ukraine to capitulate.
Us to capitulate, meaning the United States and the Europeans
not supporting Ukraine anymore,
pushing towards a negotiating table
and negotiating Ukraine away.
And Ukraine saying, "Okay, we give up,"
like happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or in Japan.
So it's his calculation, you know,
as much as anything else, which is really important.
He said, "We have to show him
that he won't get that out of it."
It's kind of less our probability
and, you know, kind of the odds of it.
It's just how he calculates that probability
of getting what he wants.
- I mean, I guess that's how the game of poker works.
It's your probability and your estimate of their probability
and your estimate of their estimate of your probability
and so on and so forth. - Yeah, so it goes on.
- I think he has two tools, right?
So one is the actual use of nuclear weapons
and then the threat of the-
- Oh, the threat is very effective.
- And the more real you make the threat-
- That's right.
- So it's like the more you approach the actual use,
like get very close to using it.
- But actually he's already using Chernobyl,
Zaporizhzhya and then usual cranes,
the other nuclear reactors.
So he's using civilian nuclear reactors as a dirty bomb.
So, you know, it's ironic that he has Sergei Shoigu,
his defense minister, calling people up and saying,
"The Ukrainians are gonna use a dirty bomb."
They're already doing it.
I mean, what is, you know, kind of more destructive
than stirring up all the radioactive dust in Chernobyl
as you send your troops through, you know, for example,
or shelling, you know, the Chernobyl plant
and the sarcophagus and putting it at risk.
And Zaporizhzhya, you've got the
International Atomic Energy Agency
running out there in utter panic
and, you know, kind of also trying to intervene
in the conflict.
So you're putting, you know,
civilian nuclear reactors at risk.
I mean, that also has the great added effect
of cutting off Ukraine's power supply
because Zaporizhzhya in particular was,
what was it, a third of Ukraine's power generation
or some, you know, really high percentage.
I'll have to go back and, you know, take a look at that.
But that's a twofer, you know,
it's a kind of a double effect there
of undermining power generation,
also frightening Germans and others
who've already been very worried about nuclear power
and, you know, increasing your leverage on the energy front,
but also scaring people from the perspective
of the use of nuclear weapon.
Those reactors also become a nuclear weapon,
tactically deployed.
And as you said, the discussion of using a nuclear weapon
and engendering all those fears,
and he's already got an effect.
Everyone's running around talking about
the Cuban Missile Crisis and secret diplomacy
and how we negotiate away Ukraine
in return for Putin not blowing up a nuclear weapon.
So he's got a lot of people already talking about that.
- So sorry for the difficult and dark question.
It could be for you directly or more like,
do you think we have a plan for this?
What happens if he does drop a nuclear weapon?
Do you have a sense that the United States has a good plan?
- I know we're talking about it.
I think we probably have several plans
because it depends on what, where, when, how.
- But don't, and also don't these things happen very quickly?
- Well, there's also signaling and signs of movement there.
I mean, I want to be very kind of careful about this,
but then the thing is,
it's also very important that we do this
with other nuclear powers.
So the other thing that's different
from how it might've been in the past,
and particularly different from the Cuban Missile Crisis
and the Euromissile Crisis,
we're not the only nuclear players.
China has a major nuclear arsenal now,
less on the strategic side, but building it up,
but very much on the intermediate range and tactical.
Kim Jong-un is firing off weapons left, right, and center
at the moment in North Korea.
We've got other rogue states.
Putin's behaving like a rogue state, just to be very clear.
And this is what we've got with Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
We've also got India and Pakistan,
and we've got other states
that we're not supposed to talk about
that we know have nuclear capacities,
and others that would like to have nuclear capacity.
And the whole question here is about also proliferation.
Getting back to that time when Ukraine had nuclear weapons,
at least there on its territory
instead of Belarus and Kazakhstan,
you've got to wonder, was it wise for them to give it up?
We were worried about loose nukes, nuclear weapons,
getting out of hand.
Proliferation at the time, we wanted fewer nuclear powers.
Russia wanted that too.
Now we're going to have more.
We've got more.
And what Putin is saying is,
well, that was stupid of Ukraine
to give up the nuclear weapons.
In fact, my colleagues and I, back in our report
and back in the U.S.S.R., kind of suggest
they shouldn't give them up.
And then that's why we had the Budapest memorandum.
That's why the United States,
the United Kingdom in particular,
have basically some responsibility and obligation
going back to 1994 when they promised Ukraine
that gave up the nuclear weapons,
their territorial integrity and sovereignty
would remain intact,
some obligation to actually do something to step up.
If we step back from that,
this is the thing that people are not talking about,
you know, what about nuclear proliferation?
If you're South Korea, Japan,
you know, you're any other country
that's kind of worrying about your neighbors,
and you know, what might happen to you?
Just like India and Pakistan are both like,
"Oh, you know, we've got to kind of keep
our strategic nuclear balance here."
Everything is up for question.
Saudis will want a nuclear weapon.
§24Transcript · 2:56:48–3:04:45
The Turks already want one.
They've talked about one for years.
You know, why should the Iranians be the only one
with an Islamic nuclear weapon?
You know, and if we know that, you know,
Iran has breakout capacity now,
the Saudis and all the other, you know, states
that are in opposition to Iran
will also want to have some nuclear capacity.
And the United States before wanted to maintain
everything under the nuclear umbrella.
You know, one of the reasons why Sweden and Finland
are joining NATO is because of, suddenly,
all of these nuclear threats.
Sweden was actually the last country on the planet
to want to have nuclear weapons.
They were actually pushing for a ban
on nuclear weapons in the United Nations.
Now that Putin's doing the nuclear saber-rattling,
you know, they're talking about joining
and are on the verge of joining a nuclear alliance.
You know, see what's happening here.
So we have to make it more and more difficult
for Putin to even contemplate that.
That's why people are saying this is reckless,
this is irresponsible.
Putin is actually making the world less safe
for himself down the line either,
but he's thinking short-term here.
He's thinking, "What can I do?
What do I actually have?"
You can also destroy lots of infrastructure,
as he's doing.
You can use subversion.
You know, we're worried about all of the undersea cables,
all these weird things happening, you know,
off Orkney or in the Mediterranean,
or, you know, all these other things that are happening,
Nord Stream 2, pipelines, other infrastructure.
There's all kinds of other things
that he can do as well here.
It's not just, you know,
again, this is a civilian nuclear threat
of blowing up, you know, one of the reactors.
Now, he's got to be sure about where the wind turns
and the wind blows.
And there's all kinds of things to, you know, factor in here.
But Putin is definitely sitting around
calculating with other people,
"What can I do to turn this around?"
I mean, he still thinks that he can win this.
Or, in other words, he can end it on his terms.
Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia.
And, you know, capitulation,
all recognized as being part of Russia.
Or he can freeze it and then, you know,
kind of figure out where it goes from there,
what other pressure he can put on.
I mean, I'm sure he's confident he can get rid of Zelensky.
And he can prevail over us.
I mean, look, I mean, the UK is going through prime ministers,
you know, faster than I'm changing my socks, you know.
So it's like, you know, he can prevail on the, you know,
basically he can have an impact
on the political scene in Europe and elsewhere.
I mean, again, everyone's talking about winter coming.
And Putin's thinking, "Yeah, great.
I've, you know, destroyed the infrastructure of Ukraine."
- Are you worried about the winter?
- Well, yeah, but I mean, look,
the other thing is that we have to start preparing.
I mean, we have to start thinking about this.
We've got a wartime economy situation.
That's where we are.
We've got the home front to think about as well.
Putin has declared war on us.
He did that on September 30th.
And he's done it at other points as well.
We've just not paid attention.
But he pretty much, pretty explicit on September 30th.
I mean, go back and watch that speech.
And, you know, he is gambling that, you know,
people will go back, you know,
to basically taking Russian gas and oil,
but it's not gonna be that simple as well.
And do people, and then, you know,
the question has to be,
do we really kind of think he's gonna play fair after that?
When he's kind of also shown that he can leverage that.
- It's such a complicated world.
- It is complicated.
It's very complicated.
- And it's never, I mean,
it feels like things are heating up.
Like, and China is very quiet right now.
- Because they're watching what happens.
I mean, for President Xi,
you know, he's trying to consolidate his power
even further after the party Congress,
but he doesn't want to look like he made a mistake
by backing Putin.
I mean, he thought Putin was also gonna be in out,
and Ukraine would probably be open
for massive Chinese investment.
China was the largest investor in Ukraine before the war.
Largest single investor.
I mean, the EU was bigger, of course.
- How do you hope the war ends in Ukraine?
- Well, I mean, I do hope it ends, you know,
with a ceasefire and a negotiated solution,
but it has to be with Russia compromising on something.
And that's not where we are right now.
- Do you think both sides might be willing to compromise?
- Most wars always end in that way.
I mean, nobody's ever happy.
- But they don't seem to, either side,
like legitimately doesn't want to compromise right now.
- Yeah, because I mean, look,
the thing is that for Ukraine right now,
anything is a compromise at its expense, right?
Vast devastation, unbelievable casualty rates,
biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Russia's just said, "Sorry, this is our territory.
It's not just Crimea."
I think there could have been a negotiation over that.
But, you know, Donetsk and Luhansk,
I mean, we've got all kinds of formulas we've had
all the way through history of, you know,
putting things under a kind of guardianship,
receivership of territory, the United Nations,
all kinds of different ways of formulating that.
We could have easily been creative.
But Russia's basically saying, "Nope, sorry,
we've taken this and any other negotiations,
just you recognizing this for us not doing more destruction."
I mean, that is not the basis for a negotiation.
And, you know, having, you know, kind of people come
and just sort of laying those terms down
is not a starting position.
I think Russia is also, you know,
in a dilemma of its own making now
because Putin has made it very difficult, you know,
to compromise just by everything that he said.
Now, for Ukraine, they've already won
a great moral, political, and military victory.
It's just hard to see it, right, at the particular moment.
They've done what the Finns did in the Winter War,
which the Finns were devastated by the Winter War as well,
but they pushed them back.
Now, the Finns lost a lot of territory.
They lost Karelia and, you know, huge swathes of territory,
but they got to be Finland.
And now they're, you know, joining NATO,
but they've been part of the EU.
The question is how to, you know,
get Ukraine to be Ukraine in a success.
But, you know, is, and that's the challenge.
Now, again, they've already won psychologically,
politically, militarily, because Putin hasn't succeeded
in what he wanted to do, but he has succeeded
in completely and utterly devastating them.
And this is the kind of the old Muscovite,
the old Russian imperial, old Soviet mentality,
you know, going all the way back to when the Muscovites
were the bag men for the, you know, the horde,
for the Mongols, it was destruction.
You know, you don't play with us, we'll destroy you.
You know, people talk about it as mafia,
but it's all, you know, all you have to go down
is to go and see Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublyov."
I mean, I remember, you know, seeing that film
when I was first as a student in Moscow
and just being, whoa, this is so brutal.
I mean, this is just unremittingly brutal,
because the whole point is that you show people
who's the boss.
The destruction is the point of things as well,
because, you know, you are emphasizing your domination.
And that's what Putin is doing right now,
is saying, okay, you want to go in a different direction,
so be it, but I'm going to make you suffer.
Remember when Khodorkovsky got out of the penal colony,
when Putin let him out eventually?
He said he's suffered enough.
But he suffered for 10, 11 years.
I don't think Putin feels that Ukraine
has suffered enough at this point,
or we have suffered enough.
- So there's a part of this invasion
that's punishment for something.
- Yeah, it's medieval.
I mean, look, we're all capable of the same things, right?
There was all that destruction,
and that's what Assad was like in Syria,
like his father, who you destroy
because you teach him a lesson.
And look, Britain did that in the colonial era.
I mean, all the history of British colonialism
is exactly the same.
I mean, all the Mao Mao, you know, and Kenya,
§25Transcript · 3:04:47–3:12:24
you know, up until recent times, brutality.
Teaching people, you know, teaching them a lesson.
You have to suffer.
The US did it.
I mean, we did it with the Native Americans.
You know, we did it all over the place, you know, as well.
This is kind of what big states do
at different points in history.
It's just that, you know, Russia has not moved on from that.
And we've learned some lessons later.
I hope we fully internalize them,
of things that we've done, you know,
kind of the past United States,
we ideally are trying to do better,
and most of Europe's trying to do better as well.
Think about France and Algeria, you know, again.
You know, we can see this in many different settings.
But I think, you know, for Putin right now,
he hasn't taught all of us sufficient a lesson.
- I just, I talked to hundreds of people in Ukraine,
and the tough thing,
the inspiring thing is that there's a unity.
The tough thing is a lot of them speak intensely of hate
towards not just Russia, but Russians.
Russians.
- That's how Europeans felt about Germany and Germans
at the end of World War II.
- And generational hate.
Like, I don't think that hate is gonna pass.
- Well, it might well take a generation.
I mean, when I was a kid in the '70s,
I went on exchanges to Germany.
And that was like, you know, 30 years,
more than 30 years after the end of the war.
My grandfather, who'd fought in World War I,
wouldn't speak to my parents when they sent me on a,
I mean, he hadn't fought in World War II,
he fought in World War I, and he hated the Germans.
And he did not want me going, you know,
to Germany as an exchange student.
He refused to meet, you know, kind of the German kid
who, you know, came to stay at my house, you know,
for example.
I mean, it takes a long time to,
you know, it takes a long time to get over that.
But you do, and we have, we have in Europe.
And that was the whole point of, you know,
all of that kind of exercise of European unity
after World War II.
Now, the big challenge is, what do we do with Russia?
Because a lot of people are talking now,
we can't have European security without Russia.
Other people are saying, we can't have a Europe,
you know, kind of with Russia.
You know, so how do we deal with this?
We've got to basically kind of,
it's gonna be like Japan and Germany
after World War II, after this.
Just the level of the atrocities
that have been carried out,
as you said, the level of hatred.
But we found a way of doing it.
Now, a lot of it will require change
on the part of Russia as well, and Russians,
and really thinking about this.
I mean, Gorbachev before tried to deal
in the late 1980s with the black spots in,
with glasnost, with openness
and talking about Russian history,
just kind of never, sort of withered on the vine
as time went on.
- What gives you hope about the future?
- Well, my hope comes into the fact
that we've done things before,
that we've got ourselves out of tough times
and we've overcome stuff and in people,
because I meet amazing people.
You just talked about hundreds of people
that you've met within Ukraine.
And, you know, people all think differently,
contexts and circumstances change
and people can evolve.
Some people get stuck, Putin's got stuck,
but people can evolve.
And, you know, I do think that
if we all pull together
and we've seen this in so many contexts,
we can find solutions to things,
just like we get back again
to our discussion about scientists
and just the kind of amazing breakthroughs of,
you know, what we did on COVID
or done on, you know, kind of other diseases and things.
And look, there is some similarities.
There's a pathology around war and conflict.
Years ago in the 1990s, I worked on,
you know, a lot of the projects
that were funded by the Carnegie Corporation
of the United States under the then presidency
of David Hamburg, who was a scientist.
And I actually did see a lot of parallels
between the sort of like the pathology of disease
and, you know, kind of the pestilence,
you know, of conflict kind of idea.
And of course, these, you know, parallels
had to be very careful because, you know, they're not neat.
But there was kind of like an idea in there
and how do you sort of treat this?
How do you deal with this?
And we did come up with all kinds of ideas
and, you know, things that are still out there.
We've created institutions that have helped to keep the peace.
We just have neglected them,
allowed them to degrade, just like the United Nations.
And, you know, we've created problems inside of them,
like the veto power of the permanent powers
on the UN Security Council.
But we can change that.
You just got to have a will.
And I do think out there,
there are sufficient people with a will
and we've just got to get people mobilized.
I mean, I'm always amazed by how people
can mobilize themselves around a crisis.
Remember Winston Churchill, I don't quote all the time
'cause I can never remember half his quotes,
but I do remember the one about
never let a good crisis go to waste.
And I always think that that, you know, yeah,
we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste.
And something else can come out of this,
just like in Ukraine, we worried before
about corruption in Ukraine, the influence of the oligarchs.
We've got our own oligarchs here in the US
we need to, you know, deal with as well.
But this is a chance to do it differently.
Yeah, it really is a chance to do things differently.
- And a part of that is young people.
I have to ask you.
- And it's young people.
I mean, I'm feeling a bit on the older side now,
but I still feel I've got, you know,
a bit of, you know, kind of youth within me at 57.
I'm not that old, but I'm not that young,
but we have to work together with younger and older people.
You've got to work together in coalitions of,
you know, across generations.
- You remind me of kids who just graduated college
and say, and I feel old.
And say, yeah, no.
- I don't actually feel old, but it is a number age.
And you know, when you kind of think about, when I was--
- I thought you don't like math.
- Yeah, yeah, I don't like things like that.
Yeah, but I find it interesting.
But you know, when I was, I remember when I was a little kid
I kept thinking about the year 2000
and I thought, oh my God, I'll be dead.
I'll be 35.
(laughing)
22 years ago.
- You've overcome a lot of struggle in your life
based on different reasons, as you write about.
Class being one of them.
Your funny sounding accent being another,
or just representation of class.
But in general, through all of that,
to be at the White House,
to be one of the most powerful voices in the world,
what advice would you give from grounded in your life story
to somebody who's young, somebody who's in high school
and college thinking of how they can have
a big positive impact on the world?
- Well, we all have a voice, right?
We all have agency.
We all actually have the ability to do something.
And you can start small in your local community
or even in your own classroom,
just helping somebody else out
or speaking up and advocating on behalf of things.
When I was about 11 years old,
I got involved with other kids on Save the Whales.
We had all this kind of, we were hardly Greta Thunberg,
but we kind of got together in a kind of network
writing to people and trying to raise money
to help save the whales.
Now, actually the whales of the world
are doing somewhat better.
I can't say that that was because of me and my network,
but it was kind of a way of organizing
and kind of joining in a larger movement.
Everybody can be part of something bigger.
The thing is, it's all about working together with others
and giving other people a chance as well.
I think one thing is that our voices
have more impact when they're amplified.
They don't have to be the voices of discord
or the voices of hate.
You've been trying to do this with your podcast,
kind of give people a voice, give them a kind of platform
§26Transcript · 3:12:28–3:19:18
and get them to join in with other people.
And one of the things that I've been trying to do
is kind of go and talk to just as many people
as I possibly can and say,
"Look, we can all do something here.
"We can all lend our voices to a cause
"that we care deeply about.
"We can be kind to each other.
"We can give other people a chance.
"We can kind of speak out
"while we see that something is wrong.
"And we can try to explain things to people."
And what I'm trying to do at the moment
is just sort of explain what I've learned about things
and hope that that helps people
make informed judgments of their own
and that kind of maybe take things further
and learn something more.
It's like kind of like building up on the knowledge
that I have to try to impart to others
and everybody can do that different ways.
You can kind of reach back.
Yeah, if you're 14, help somebody who's seven.
If you're 21, help somebody who's 14.
Kind of in the kind of my age now,
I'm always trying to reach back
and work with younger people, listen to younger people,
help them out, make connections for them,
listen to what they have to say about something,
try to incorporate that in things that I'm saying as well.
The main point is that we've all got a voice,
we've all got agency,
and it always works better
when we work together with other people.
- But sometimes it can feel pretty hopeless.
It can feel, I mean, there's low points.
You seem to have a kind of a restless energy,
a drive to you.
Were there low points in the beginning
when in your early days,
when you're trying to get the education
where it may have not been clear to you
that you could be at all successful?
- Yeah, there always were.
I mean, there were lots of points where I was just despondent
but then I'd meet somebody
who would just suddenly turn things around.
I was this look or was I out there looking for it?
Sometimes if you're open and receptive
to hearing something from someone else.
I mean, there were often times where I felt so despondent,
in such a black mood, I didn't think I'd be able to go on.
And then I'd have a chance conversation with somebody.
I mean, I once remember, I was sitting on a bench,
I was probably 11 or 12, just crying my eyes out,
just really upset.
And an old lady just came and sat next to me,
put her arm around me, said, "Oh, it's all right, pet.
"What's the matter?
"It can't be that bad, can it?"
And it was just this human embrace.
It's like somebody just basically reaching out to me
that snapped me out of it.
And I thought, "Here's somebody just,"
she didn't know who I was,
she just felt really bad that I was sitting, crying.
And I mean, I can't even remember what it was about anymore.
Now it just seems inconsequential.
At the time, I probably thought my life was at an end.
Just sometimes people making eye contact
with you in the street and saying something to you
can kind of pull you out of something.
And it's kind of a,
I think you would just have to open yourself up
to the prospect that not everyone's bad,
just like you were saying before,
that there's good in everybody.
Even during that really difficult period of impeachment,
I was trying to listen very carefully to people.
And I thought, "Look, we still have something in common here.
"We need to remember that."
When people are kind of forgetting who they are
or the context in their operating,
there's always something that can pull you back again.
There's always that kind of thread.
- So I'm sure you were probably attacked by a lot of people
and you were still able to keep that optimism that-
- Well, I kept it into kind of perspective.
Like when I was a kid, I mean,
things I mentioned before, I got bullied,
kind of, again, and I tried to understand
why they're doing this.
One of the most amazing things that happened really on
was my dad was a pretty incredible person
and he would always open my eyes to something.
I was getting bullied really nastily by a girl at school.
And my dad started asking me questions about her.
And one day, my dad said we were gonna go for a walk.
And my town's very small.
Remember, it's very depressed, really deprived area.
And we go to this housing estate, public housing place
that's not too far away from where I live.
And it's really kind of one of the most run-down places
and already run-down place.
My dad knocks on the door and I said, "What are we doing, dad?"
And I see he says, "We're going off to,
we're gonna visit somebody, an old family friend."
I think even a distant relative.
We're knocking on the door and this old man answers the door
and he's, "Oh, Alfie."
My dad's name was Alf Alfie.
You know, kind of, "Oh, fancy seeing you here.
I haven't seen you.
Come on in, have a cup of tea.
What are you doing?"
He said, "Oh, I'm just walking past with my daughter.
We're going for a trip."
There, we're going for a walk.
And then suddenly I see that girl and she's in the kitchen.
And I'm thinking, "Oh my God, bloody hell."
You know, British expression, "What's this?"
And it turns out that dad had figured out who she was.
And he knew her grandfather
and she was living with her grandfather.
And she'd been abandoned by her parents.
And she was living in, you know, pretty dire circumstances.
And she'd been getting raised by her grandfather
and she was just miserable.
And the reason she was bullying me
was to make herself feel better.
And after that, she never bullied me again.
I mean, we didn't even talk.
Because there was a connection made.
And suddenly she realized that her grandfather,
who was the only person she had,
knew my dad and they were friends or they were even family.
Some kind of relationship there.
I mean, I was raised half north of England.
I had no idea how we were related.
You know, everybody was some relative.
Because people have lived there for generations
to get in this very small area.
And that turned things around.
So just remember, you might have.
And that's kind of suddenly taught to me
there's always a reason why somebody is doing something.
A lot of the times they're really unhappy with themselves.
Sometimes there's something else going on in their lives.
Sometimes they just don't know any better.
And I shouldn't take it personally
because I don't have a personal connection
with half these people who are out there
saying that they want this and that to happen to me.
- Well, thank you for the kindness and the empathy
you still carry in your heart.
I can see it through all that you must have gone through
in the recent couple of years.
It's really inspiring to see that.
And thank you for everything you've done,
for the work you've written,
for the work you continue to write and to do.
This seems like a really, really difficult time
for human civilization on a topic
that you're a world expert in.
So don't mess it up.
- No, I know, but that's what I was saying.
Do everybody have that?
Let's just keep it together, right?
- Yeah, exactly.
- Let's just keep it together.
- Your words have a lot of power right now.
So it's a really, really tricky time.
So thank you so much.
Given how valuable your time is to sit down with me today.
It was an honor.
- No, thanks, thanks.
No, it's a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you as well.
No, thank you.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation with Fiona Hill.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you some words from John Steinbeck.
Power does not corrupt, fear corrupts.
Perhaps the fear of the loss of power.
Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you next time.
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