Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump | Lex Fridman Podcast #335
- We've gotta have strategic
empathy about Putin as well. We've gotta 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 gotta understand that. We've gotta 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. - 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 administration's, 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? - Well, I was born in 1965, and it was the period where the whole coal sector in
Britain was in decline already. And, you know, 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, you know, around the same kind of age. I mean, you had a lot of people, you know, at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, you know, 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 of the qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So he worked in a steelworks
that didn't work out, at brick works 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 know, 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, you know, some
kind of idea that maybe I, you know, 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, you know, as a nurse
and then as a midwife. I had other relatives who'd
gone to teach, you know, in local schools. And so there was an idea that, you know, 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 mean, I was trying to sort
of 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 wanna be? Where you wanna go? - Yeah, I mean, there
were a number of things. I mean, I think like a
lot of kids, you know, you talk to people and particularly from blue
collar background said, "What did you wanna do?" Boys might say, "I wanted
to be a fireman," you know, or you got, you know, kind of, at one point was a little
girl, I wanted to be a nurse, and I had little nurses'
uniform like my mother. I didn't really know what that meant. But you know, 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, you know, kind of, that was one of the formative ideas. We also, it was a rural
area, semi-rural area. And you know, I'd be out
in the fields all the time and I'd watch farmers, you
know, with their animals, and I'd see vets coming
along and, you know, watching people deal with a livestock. And there was a kind of a
famous story at the time about a vet called James Herriot. He came 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 aunts 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, you know, pep talks for kids in these,
you know, 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 gonna 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, you know, thought of her nursing
as a career, though. I mean, and it genuinely was. And she was out there trying to help women survive childbirth. My mother had these
horrific stories, you know, basically over the dining room table. I wish 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 wanna
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, de-industrialization and
the complete collapse of the local government system around me, still maintain money for education. And they also paid for exchanges. And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany and France, also in Russia and Kostroma
near Yaroslavl for example. An old textile town similar, you know, down in its kind of region but, you know, quite historic in the Russian context. In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov Dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham, you know, was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context. And so, there 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, basically provoked by
the Euro Missile Crisis. So the station 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, you know, 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,
you know, 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
first nuclear strike. And that then set up a whole set of literal chain reactions
in the Soviet Union. Eventually it was
recognized that, you know, all of this was really
based on misperceptions. And of course, you know, 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 as a teenager, you know, 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, threats 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, you know, 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, you know, instead if
there was a nuclear flash. You know, we'd have to, you
know, get down on the floor, not look up, but the curtains would help. And we'd be like, "This
is ridiculous, dad." And then we would all try to see if we could squeeze in
the space under the stairs or cupboard under the
stairs, like Harry Potter. And it's all just, you know, totally nuts. Or you had to throw yourself
in a ditch if you were outside. And I thought, well, this,
this isn't gonna work. And one of my great uncles who had fought in World War II said, "Well, look, you are
good at languages, Fiona, why didn't you go and study Russian? Try to figure it out. Figure out why the Russians
are trying to blow us up." (Lex laughing) Because, you know, during the- - Go talk to 'em.
- Exactly. During World War II,
- Yeah. - The United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union had
all been wartime allies. And my Uncle Charlie thought, well, there's something going 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 basically translating
perhaps at some, you know, future arms control summit. - So how did the journey
continue with learning Russian? I mean, this is 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 actually possibly could about, you know, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. And, you know, I started to
try to teach myself, you know, Russian a little bit as well. - [Lex] 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 try
to understand all of that. And also, you know,
like many other people, I read, you know, Russian
literature in translation. I'd read "War and Peace" and, you know, I'd loved the book actually. I mean, particularly, you
know, 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 theories 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. - Yeah.
- You know, could he have just gone on with a story? What an amazing story. What incredible, you know,
kind of book this is. - I still think he needs
an editor, but wrong. - Yeah. 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 miner strike in the United Kingdom in 1984. Now, the miners of County
Durham had very interestingly had exchanges and ties
with the miners of Donbas going back to the 1920s.
- Okay. - And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots
of contacts between, you know, 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, the old industrial areas, basically big industrial areas
like the northeast of England and places like Donbas were
built up at the same time, often by the same sets of industrialists. And Donetsk in the Donbas region used to be called Hughesovka because it was established
by a Welsh industrialists who brought in miners from
Wales to help, you know, kind of develop the coal mines there. And also the steelworks
and others that, you know, we're hearing about all the time. And so I got very fascinated
in all these linkages and, you know, 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 Donbas,
along with other miners from famous coal regions like Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany,
or miners in Poland, sent money in solidarity to
the miners of County Durham. And there'd been these exchanges, I said, going back and forth since the 1920s, formal exchanges between miners, you know, the region and 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 place called Red Hills, where the miners of Country Durham would actually pool all of their resources and built up their own parliament and their own, you know,
kind of 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, you know, were involved in some
of these writer circles in other parts of Britain and mining communities, for example. And so they told me I could, you know, go along and basically, apply for a grant to go to study Russian. So I show up and it was
the easiest, you know, application I've ever come across. They just asked me to, my dad came along with me, they asked me to verify, you know, 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, you know, to basically pay for the travel and some of the basic
expenses for the study. And they wrote me a check. And so thanks to the miners of Donbas and this money that was
deposited with the miners of County Durham, the
Durham Miners Association, I got the money to study
Russian for the first time before and embarked on
my studies at university. - As you're speaking now, it's reminding me that there's
a different way to look both at history and at geography
and at different places is, you know, this is an industrial region. - That's right. - And it echoes in 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. - [Fiona] That's right.
In the place itself. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I mean, there are places
in the United States in Appalachia and 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
Donbas has experienced over, you know, the last 30 years, that people came from all
over the place to work there. Of course, there was a population that one might say is
indigenous, you know, might have gone back centuries there, but they would've 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 like 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 Donbas. It's a place that's apart in
many respects historically, and in terms of its evolution
and development over time. And you know, particularly in
the case of, you know, Russia, the Russians have tried to
say, well, look, you know, because most people speak Russia, there is the lingua franca. I mean, in the Northeastern 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, ship building, for example and 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 Thorez, 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 sort of broken out
onto the national stage. Everything in northern
England was nationalized. We had British Steel, British Coal, British Rail, British Ship Building. 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 a quite a distortion on the way that people
looked at the world. - Do you still speak Russian? - [Fiona] I do, yeah. (Lex speaking in Russian) (Fiona speaking in Russian) (Lex speaking in Russian) Yeah, it would be a big
mystery for everybody. And you have an advantage on me 'cause 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 of 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 peak of Perestroika and Michel Gorbachev's role as president. Well, he wasn't quite
president at that point. It's all 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, was just within, you know,
kind of weeks of them about to sign that, which
really ends that whole period that had shared my entire teenage years of the end of the Euro Missile Crisis by finally having agreement on, you know, basically the reduction in 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, you know, in Moscow, which is where I was studying
at the Translator's Institute, to the Caucuses, to Central Asia, went all the way to Khabarovsk
in the Russian Far East, all the way around, you
know, kind of Moscow. And there was, at this point, it was also the, khristianizatsiya Rusi, which has become very important now, so the anniversary, the 1,000th 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. And at this point, the
Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival
from being repressed during the Soviet period. You suddenly have the church stepping out as a non-governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. So that was, you know, 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. You know, I'd never seen a ballet. I mean, I was not exactly steeped
in high classical culture. When you kinda growing up in
a mining region, you know, there 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, property, everything, you know, they possibly could education wise, but it wasn't exactly
any exposure to this. So, you know, I was kind of a standard 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'd got this image about
what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest,
terrified at first, about what I would see there, you know, 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, an ordinary place not doing great. This is the period of, you know, what they call, defitsita vremya, you know, so the period of deficit where 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 pile of boots all in the same size, in the same color. I actually looked out,
because once I was in this Hungarian boot shop that
was right next to where my hall of residence was, and I was looking for 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 over supply 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 'cause everybody lost their jobs. It was massive unemployment. 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 onto 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 steelworks closed down, and the wagon works for 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. Also, the place was
falling apart literally. I saw massive sinkhole
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 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
of 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 1,000 times if how many times the
Soviet Union would collapse. - Yeah. I wonder about that too. And I also wonder about, what would've happened
if it didn't collapse and Gorbachev had found
a different direction. - I mean it's, 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 those are, 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 US right now as a kind of soft secession
with states, you know, going off in their own
direction in on the center- - [Lex] In which which state? - Well, you know, these
kinds of conceptions that we have now are divisions between red and blue states.
- Yeah. - 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, you know, many
other countries as well, because there wasn't
that ethnic dimension. But in fact, many of
our, 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 are from, you know, originally in Ukraine, that language is not the
main signify 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 United States, I think a very small
minority people would want to actually secede even in Texas where I spend a lot of my time. - [Fiona] Yeah. - I think that there is a
common kind of pride of nation. You know, 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, it's stupid
weather, it's raining again." - [Fiona] Yeah. - But really what they mean is, we're in this muck together. There's a together there that I... - I also feel that when I go around, because I mean, I've spent a lot of time since I wrote my book in last October in 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 good
book called "Collapse" by Vlodislav Zubok, who is a professor at London School of Economics, at LSE. And Zubok is pretty much
my age and he is from, you know, 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, you know, here as well when you
get partisan politics and people forgetting, you
know, they are Americans and they are all in this together, like a lot of the population think. But they think that their own, you know, narrow parties on ideological precepts, you know, camp for more. And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also
a power play, you know, 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, you know, the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who then, you know, got rid of, you know, basically the central
figure of Michel 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, you know, a lot of time in Russia as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus, Central Asia and, you know, 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, you know, in different directions
and straining, you know, the overall body politic. And the way that national politics gets imposed on local politics in ways that I, it certainly wasn't when I
first came to the US in 1989, 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 in 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 nonpartisan. 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 nonpartisan 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 know, you have quite clear platforms. You know, there's also a longer history in many respects, obviously. I mean, there's a long history
here in the United States as the development of
the parties, you know, going back to the late 18th century. But in the United Kingdom, you know, for example, in the 20th century, the development of the
mass parties, you know, 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 just kind of see what they stood for. And the same in Europe, you know, when you look at France
and in Germany and, that 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 a
Republican like Trump did. At one point, he's Democrat,
next thing he's 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, you know, 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 and that
people can pick upon, pick out. And it's more over time, as I've noticed, become more like a kind of an affiliation even with a 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 more Republican and on, you know, family holiday
was a book on their table, said, "100 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.
- Right. - I thought, "Well, there
you go then," you know. 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, in 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 picked the tribe." I mean, it was more eloquent
than that but it was, it is basically, this is
a really good test to see, are you actually thinking about like how to solve problems versus like, you're with the 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's
against Donald Trump and like acknowledge it
to yourself privately. Oh, that's a good idea.
I'm glad he said that. - Or he is even asking the
right kinds of questions, which he often did actually. I mean, obviously put them in a way that most of us wouldn't have done, but there was often
kind of question about, why is this happening? Why are we doing this? And you know, we have to
challenge ourselves all the time. So yeah, actually, why are we doing that? And then you have to, and really inspect it and say whether it's actually
worth continuing that way or they should be doing
something differently. Now. We had a more kind
of destructive quality to those kinds of questions, you know, about maybe it's the real estate
developer in him that was, you know, ticking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of, you know, sacred edifices and things like that. But 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 we 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, you know, out of turn. - And, you know, the another strength, the thing that people often, that criticize Donald Trump
will say is the weakness, is his lack of civility can be a strength. Because I feel like sometimes, bureaucracy functions
on excessive civility. Like actually I've seen
this, it's not just, it's bureaucracy in all forms. Like in tech companies, as they grow, everybody kind of, you know, you're getting pretty good salary. Everyone's comfortable, and there's a meeting and you discuss how to move stuff forward. And like, 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 can 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 how Steve Jobs worked, that's how Elon Musk works, you have to roll in. That's what first principal's
thinking looks like. - The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name calling, you know, kind of inciting violence
against, you know, the people that disagree with. So that was kind of a
problem because I mean, often when, you know, when
I was in the administration, I had all of Europe in my
portfolio as well as Russia. And there were many times when, you know, we were dealing with
our European colleagues where he was asking some
pretty valid questions about, well, why should we do
this if you are doing that? You know, 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, you know, spending so much
money on NATO and NATO defense and we're all talking about
this, if you are then, you know, basically paying billions,
you know, to Russia for gas. Isn't this, you know, contradictory? And of course it was, but it
was the way that he did it. And I actually, you know, 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, you know, former defense secretary Gaetz , 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 go and make it effective, which we would always try to focus on because it's the kind of the, it was the delivery.
- Yeah. - 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 it's 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 it does work.
- Right. - Because there were, you know,
oftentimes where, you know, that kind of relentless, you
know, nagging about something or constantly raising it
actually did have results where it hadn't previously.
- Right. - 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,
you know, 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 in the Kremlin concluded that the US did not care one little bit about Ukraine
and it was just a game. For trumpet was personal game. He was basically trying
to get Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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, you know, 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, 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 and actually could, because what was 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 excuses 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 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. - Yes, signaling the
value we place in peace and stability in that part of the world, or the reverse by saying,
we don't care about- - [Fiona] Yeah, we seem to
not care. It was just a game. - But I mean, the US role in
that war is very complicated. - [Fiona] Of course.
- 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, you know, some of the, let's just say rosy perspectives that I held of the United States. I'd been shocked by the depths of racial problems, 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, you know, slavery in American history, but I hadn't fully
fathomed, you know really, the kind of the way that it was ripping
apart the United States. I mean, I had reed Alexis,
you know, de Tocqueville and he'd commented on
this and it obviously hadn't, you know, kind
of changed to the way that one would've expect
all this time, you know, from the 18th, you know, century onwards. So that was kind of one
thing that, you know, that I realized that the
Civil Rights Movement and all of these, you
know, acts of expansion, of suffrage and everything
else were imperfect at best. You know, and I was born in 65, the same time as the Civil Rights Act. It was a heck of a long way still to go. So I wasn't, let's just say, you know, as starry-eyed about
everything as had been before. But I really saw an incredible competence and professionalism in, you
know, the US government, and the election system
and the integrity of it. I mean, I really saw that. I saw that the United
States was the gold standard for, you know, kind of some
of its, you know, 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 faced in this whole botched analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of, honestly, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 redescribe any words, totally crazy looking glass
thinking of, you know, "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, you know, by people that this was, you know, kind of 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 when a lot of
the people that I work with, but what I found, you know, if you want to use that, you know, 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 were just
being thrown out the window. And that, you know, I
would have to step up in defense of them and in
defense of my colleagues who were being lambasted
and, you know, 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
in 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 parties and hacks,
you know, deep state. - [Lex] Yes. - Coup plotters, you know, you name it. Their patriotism being questioned as well. And a lot of people I
worked with in government, like myself, naturalized Americans, lots 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'd 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 is what really made, you know, that cliche of America great. It wasn't, you know, whatever it was, it was being, you know, bandage 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
gonna make a go of it, and that they're going to, you know, try to work towards the whole bit of pride of the preamble of the constitution, towards a more perfect union. And, 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 why 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 of 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 for careers of public service, trying to give something
back were being shattered. And I found, you know, I
just thought to myself, I'm not gonna let that happen because, you know, I've come from a... Well, are they gonna send me back to Bishop Auckland in County Durham? Fine. I'm totally fine to go back.
- Yeah. - You know, 'cause I could
do something back there, but I'm not gonna 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, sort of 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 and 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. - [Fiona] Yep. - 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 the, not the treatment of individual people, but by the results.
- Right. Yeah. I think that's fair. Yeah. - So, if you 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 Georgia W. Bush is invading Iraq. - Yeah.
- Or maybe how it was invaded or maybe how the decision
process was made to invade it, again, Afghanistan, but
maybe not the invasion, but details around like
having a plan about, you know, how to withdraw,
all that kind of stuff. Then 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, and I mean, I don't know the numbers, but I think he was the
president for eight years over increased drone attacks, like 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 nonpartisan. So that, you know, if you do
sort of to still 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 the wrench. 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.
- Yes. - But, you know, the question is, if you bring the whole
system down with nothing, ideas of putting it into place, look, I mean, I am, like many people, I've studied the Bolshevik Revolution and, you know, many others as
well, and, you know, kind of, you know, what's the
pattern here, you know, that actually fits into what
you're talking about here is the kind of rigidity of thought on the part of revolutionaries
in many cases as well. And also narcissism. In fact, I think it
takes a pretty, you know, strong sense of yourself, you know, kind of an owning yourself to wanna 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 you brought in different perspective and actually listen to them
and not just, you know, believe that he himself knew
better than anyone else, and then try to divide
everybody against each other, it would've 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 their 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 a 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 Nika 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 a Obama as well, there's a varied narrow circle
of decision making, you know. Bush, period, it's the focus
on the executive branch with Dick Cherney 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 very smart guy. And you know, he's convinced that he has, and he ruminates over 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, 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, 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 and 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, over
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. There's not a lot of mechanisms for bringing people together. There ought to be. And 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
breakdown on this, you know, kind of front. We don't have sufficient
of those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds. You know, and one of the other problems that we've have 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 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. And that's their
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 on 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, "Ah, 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. And 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, you know, 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? - [Fiona] Yeah. - And creating a culture of
like attracting the right, I mean, basically chief hirer. 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 building a team, an incredible team.
- But 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 we look at other governments around the world, you
know, that are smaller, it's much easier for
them to hire people in. - [Lex] Yeah. You Know, some of the most successful governments are much smaller. And it's not that I
say that the, 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, with
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, you know, 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, in any kind of rational way. It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan tainted at every level anyway. So I would actually just make a bid for a more nonpartisan 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. - [Lex] Yeah.
- 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 kind 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 where they're like, "Oh yeah,
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. And if people could see kind
of themselves reflected, and many of the people who
have gone into public service, I think though they would-
- Yeah, there used to be- - Could 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 it's not, because right now a lot
of people see government as basically partisan warfare. And then, 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 pretty rare individual
in terms of non-partisanship. Like, it just 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? - So your first advice is
to fire yourself after? - Well, you should
definitely have term limits, just like you should in everything, right? I mean, it is just like
tenure in university. You kind of like- - [Lex] 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'm like, I'm 57 now, and I always try to work with, you know, people from different generations from me, just like, you know, I've really benefited
from these, you know, kind of mentorships that people are 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, honestly. I'd like to more team
network to kind of approach, the things, not 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
come 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 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 it was wrong. I mean, sometimes I didn't agree because I didn't see the,
you know, 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, kinda, "We need to figure out a
different way of doing things." But the one point I do
wanna get across is, there were a lot of people who were nonpartisan 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 fashion 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, like, 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 gotta call that out. You know, is that a partisan act or is that a kind of, you know, 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, you know, unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views about
things and political opinions. And, you know, you make some 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 representation. Somebody's gonna be there
on, you know, for you, you know, not part of
a kind of a rigid team that you are excluded from. You are 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, are actually getting
workers, you know, pushing the people talk
about the rise of the work. 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, the 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 are
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, the Starbucks employees
are trying to unionize. We have unions among
our research assistants at 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. 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 a longer discussion. There's also criticisms
of 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
pulled their resources, they set up their own parliament so they could all get together. Literally, they built a parliament and it, you know, 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 didn't pay the tax and they, you know, 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 of their own communities and have a voice in the
things that mattered. You know, education, you know, 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 mines and Donbas 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
barristers in Starbucks want, or workers in Amazon. They're talking 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 'cause you didn't vote for me." You know, if you're not a
Democrat, you're not 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 workplace. This is kind of my collective. Therefore this is where 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 away full circle back to that, you know, kind of period of the early emergence
of sort of mass labor and you know, the way... 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, - You know, with unions at a
small scale, on 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-
- There you go. - Caricature of a thing.
- Exactly. - Or like Christmas and
the holidays, it's like- - I don't disagree,
but what I'm saying is, people are basically
looking for something here. - Yes.
- 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 to 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 the experience that, 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
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 and
Congressional prerogatives. I was as well. I was, you know, running off myself and, you know, 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, you know, 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, and many of the members of
Congress on the Republican side. No, 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, 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, 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- - [Fiona] And stick it to the other side. - Stick it to the other side. - No I agree. 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, it was for their own incentive to do that. - Yeah. There were others who did
a lot of grandstanding. Yeah. And that's another problem of our political incentive structures, 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 studied to
become an American citizen. It's not something you take on lightly. And you know, it'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, you know,
worrying about this, or am I actually gonna 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 on the cybersecurity? - 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. I've been studying it 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. There 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, the, 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 is a banana republic that it's so vulnerable to
these kinds of efforts?" And he actually looked
genuinely mystified, although, I mean obviously
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, of the kind of problems domestically. He just took advantage of them and, you know, basically added a bit of an accelerant 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 they're doing just positive stuff and just being kind to people. - Yeah, I always kind of wonder, 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 gotta kind of hope
that you could do this, use the same networks
for positive effects. - 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 pleasure is to do something difficult, break through the systems
and do the ethical thing, - [Fiona] Right? - 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 Karen Schwartz did with the releasing
journals and publications that were behind paywalls to the public. - Right. Right, exactly.
- And got arrested for it, then committed-
- Yeah. Yeah. - 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 and the influence. I would like to, I mean, obviously, hopefully people now
understand that better, they're trying to defend
the national security of this country. But it's just, it felt like, 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.
(Fiona laughing) They'll just, (imitates swooshing) and 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, the 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, you know, what the Chinese did in
Russia was 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 know, you call up "The New York Times" and people are gonna run with it. And what they wanted was the perception that they had actually
sweared 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 are 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, Clinton's emails or you know, kind of Anthony Wiener 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 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. 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, 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 corks 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. And I wanted, you know, to basically try to work with
others 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 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 solve 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 were up 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. That 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 bought 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 had to go looking for information. I'm not in social media. I'm into social media, but
not by myself, you know. I don't put myself out there. I haven't got a Twitter feed out. - You don't have a Twitter one? Yeah.
- No. - But there is that, (laughing) - There's one Fiona Hills cat, and I have all kinds of strange things. It's Fiona Hill's cat, which
I kind of like, you know. Occasionally 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, look, you know, my mom sends me stuff and
I'm like, "What is this?" (Fiona laughing)
- [Lex] Yeah. - It's just, you know,
your own mother can be as much of an agent of
misinformation as, you know, a kind of Vladimir Putin. - [Lex] Oh yeah. - I mean, we're all, you know, kind of, we all have to really think
about what it is we are reading. There's one thing from my childhood that was really important to me. I always think every kid
in school should have this. My next door neighbor, he was actually very
active in the Labor Party. And he was, you know,
kind of really interested in the way that opinion, you know, shaped people's political views. And his name 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 because 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 the 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 the 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 sort of the hysteria
that can be created. Like, it does seem that the
American system somehow, not the political system,
just humans love drama. We're very good, like the
Hunter Biden laptop story, there's always like one,
two, three stories somehow that we just pick, that we just gonna, this is the stuff we're gonna fight about for this election. - And everyone's got an opinion on it. - Yeah.
- Everybody. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. - And it's the most important, like Hillary Clinton's emails, 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 dunno, people running out and trying them out, you
know, something like that. - And there's fun. I mean, there's all just 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 like that, 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. - Yeah. So 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 of official, their family should be nowhere
near anything they're doing. - Well that I could push
back and disagree on. I mean, kind of- - 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 that, you know, you name it out there. - 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. 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 kind of clouds, you know, I would encourage, you know, my daughter to do something
completely different. - Right.
- Not go to the same field. Now look, it's different if you are, you know, into science or, you know, mathematics or something like this. And you know, maybe, you know, kind of you've got a family member, 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,
he 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, it says there's that too. In a 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 want to think outside the box of the previous- - Yeah, you wanna find meaning. But I mean, but they
shouldn't be sort of told, no, sorry, you can't go and
study math 'cause you know, or 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, just 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 if Putin himself. I mean, that's when a
system has degenerated and that's gonna 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 is 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. 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. - But would you be,
- Although I saw this, you know, kind of over a period of time, but I didn't feel, you know, kind of any, you know, sense of derangement, you
know, kind of around him. But he didn't drive me nuts in that way. 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 notice 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. - Yeah.
- Yep. - And I just feel like
people don't load that in when they're, honestly-
- And a lot of those people didn't vote for him and his
personality and often could, because I know a lot of
people who voted for him first time and second time, and they could disassociate, you know, kind of the, 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 be shaken up and- - Some people might have
voted him for his personality. See, this is what I'm trying to tell you. - Yeah, no, some of them, no, some of them did as well, but I'm just saying that
not all of them did either. - Well, we don't know that
data, that's the thing. - But yeah, I can't say how much is, I'm just saying anecdotally, I know people who voted
him because he is him. - Yeah.
- And from the charisma and others who voted because
he's shaking things up and, you know, he is
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. You have to imagine 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 do. Look, I think part of that is, I mean, look, first of all, I wanna 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 are 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 extraordinary important. I mean, I know that
from, you know, myself. Everything, you know,
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 in 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 kinda 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 a
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're like that
personality and you know, what they say to them rather than what they're necessarily
gonna do for the country. I mean, which is, you know,
kind of pretty absurd. And the, I mean, 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, so 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 all 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's funny. I have been to his rallies. I got, you know, all kind of charged up." And I said, "Could you see
yourself voting for Biden?" "No, he is too old." And I said, Well," you know,
he is only just a little bit, you know, kind of older than Trump or is, you know, the
same age as your grandma. Do you think your grandma's old?" "Oh no, not at all." But it's just this kind of perception. He's boring, you know? So 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 writ large, the kind of the symbol of the state. Look at, you know, in
Britain, you had, you know, 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 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 you feel about that person? Oh, I couldn't 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 and the electoral college vote. So it wasn't just, you know,
gender or something like that. But it was an awful lot of things. The people 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 the 11, you know,
12% of people, you know. So they could vote for some completely, totally different,
radically different people because that sort sense
of change and charisma. I mean, I had people who
I knew voted for Trump, but would've 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 about. One of my relatives said, "I could listen to
Obama all day every day. I just loved the way he sounded. I loved the way he looked, you know. I was just like, the
whole thing about him." And then what do you 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 that 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 wanna 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
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 next,
sticking with your person, really like a sport 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 looked at
the first couple of terms of his presidency, I think, you know, on the overall ledger,
he would've 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 and the Russian economy
and financial system, he built up a pretty
impressive team of technocrats for everything, Central
Bank and the economics and, you know, 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 futile 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 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 like a, I guess, a sense of much
more political pluralism. And it wasn't the kind of the
chaos of the Yeltsin 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 a kind
of a different phase emerging. And, you know, part of it is the larger international environment where Putin is 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 cross hairs 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 GA, and actually could be
genuinely one of the, you know, the major economic and financial powers. And then suddenly, he realizes that 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 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 big 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 elected by Americans. There somehow was some kind
of external interference 'cause 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 'cause he knew that people
weren't that thrilled about him coming back. Did kind of like 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 the, you know, the whole attitudes of Gotti'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, he starts 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 and
many of the things that, you know, I've written about Putin. But 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 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, 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, 'cause I mean, the initial
question you asked me is about 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, and you start to take things
in a very different direction. He starts to clamp it down at home because of the rise of opposition and the fact that he
knows that his, you know, brand is not the same as it was before. And his popularity's not
the same as it was before because he's already gone over that, you know, that period
in anybody's, you know, professional and you know, political life that, you know, if you
stay around long enough, people get a bit sick of you, you know. As we talked about that before, should you stay, you
know, kind of in any job for a long period of
time, you need refreshing. And, you know, kind of Putin is, you know, starting to look like he's
gonna be there forever. And people are not happy about that and would like the chance as well to kind of move on and move up, and, you know, with
him and still in place, that's not going to be
particularly possible. And that, you know, that's around the time when he starts to make the
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, you know, Vladimir Putin being a
positive force within Russia. Because if you pay a very close attention to his speech on the annexation
of Crimea in March of 2014, you see all of the
foreshadowing of, you know, where we are now. It's already of kind of his
view of kind of his obsessions, his historical obsessions,
his view of himself has been kind of fused with the state to kind of a modern czar and his idea that the
West is up to get him. And it becomes after that almost a kind of like a
Messianic mission, you know, 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 Patrushev? Is it Shoigu,
the Minister of Defense? Is it, like you mentioned
Peskov, the Press Secretary? What role does 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, you know, and his counterparts from
Ukraine, Belarus, pull it apart, there was an awful lot
of people who, you know, 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, you know,
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 rational
nationalists over time, rather than Soviet, you know,
hardliners who, you know, 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, you know, Mayor Luzhkov, for example, in Moscow by, you know, other forces
in the Russian Duma, not just, you know, Vladimir
Zhirinovsky and others, but you really serious, you know, kind of what we would call him like right wing, you
know, nationalist forces. But it's, you know,
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, you know, 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, there's
a more power, honestly. And to see Putin as
their vehicle for power. I think for people like Sergey Kiriyenko, I knew Kiriyenko back in the 90s. I mean, my God, that guy's all in. Or like Dmitri Medvedev, you know, who was, you know, a warmer,
fuzzier version of Putin. Certainly had a totally
different perspective. Wasn't in the KGB-
- Did you say warmer, fuzzier? - 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, you
know, how he was, you know, earlier in his career. And he, you know, 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, you know, dealing with the starsy 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 Patrochevs and Bortnikov and others, and Sergei Ivanov and others, you know, from, you know, the
different configurations of his administration who have come out of that same kind of mindset
and are kind of, you know, wanting to sort of put
everything back together again. So there's a lot of enablers and a lot of, you know, power seekers and there are a lot of
people who, you know, 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 it 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
something he deeply confides. No, I think he compartmentalizes things. He's often said that the only
person he trusts 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 you know, kind of some
of the other people who are, you know, friends with
him that gonna go back to his time in St. Petersburg, you know. At various points, he seemed to, you know, spend a lot of time, you know, way back when talking to
people who were, you know, people think of kind of
more moderating forces like Alexei Kudrin, but you know, doesn't seem to be interacting,
you know, with them. You know, there are obviously aspects of his personal life, you know, does he speak to his daughters? Does he, you know, speak to, you know, kind of lovers, you know, kind of in a way people
speculate about, you know, kind of 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 with, 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, you know, of people and of information. And I think, you know,
part of the problems that, you know, we see with Putin now might have come from
isolation during COVID. I mean, I'm really
convinced that, you know, like many of us, you know, 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. You know, obviously he was in a bubble, different kind of bubble for most of us. I mean, most of us are not
bubbles with multiple, you know, kind of palaces and, you
know, the kind of the Kremlin. But you know, we've
seen, you know, so much, it's obviously a lot of this
is staged that isolation, you know, the kind of making it very clear that he's the czar, the
guy who is in charge, making all the decisions, you know, one end of the table and everybody
else is at the other end. But you know, it's very
difficult then to bring, you know, 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 have a lot of
meetings with, you know, people in the presidential administration who brought outside, you know, would say all source
information, you know, for him and, you know, kind of
funneled in information from different think tanks and, you know, different viewpoints and maybe a kind of more eclectic, diversified set of information. He would meet with people, you know, you've heard all the stories about where he had once called
a Masha Gessen, you know, and had a, you know, come in, you know, obviously a, you know, a very different character
as a journalist and a critic. You know, we've heard about
Venediktov from Echo Moskvy, the, you know, the radio program, the editor who Putin would, you know, talk to and consult with. He'd reach out people like
Lyudmila Alexeyeva for example, the head of Memorial. He had some respect for
her and would, you know, sometimes just, you know, talk to her, you know, for example. All of that seems to have come to a halt. And I think a lot of us worry, I mean us who, you know, watch Putin about what kind of information
is he getting, you know? Is it just the 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 about social media preferences. Are people just bringing into him things that they think he wants to
hear, like the algorithm, you know, kind of like the
Kremlin working in that regard? Or is he himself, you know, tapping into source of information
that he absolutely wants? And remember, he's not a military guy. He's an operative and he was
sort of trained in operations and, you know, contingency planning. Sergei Shoigu, the Defense
Minister is 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, you know, in this, you know, 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, you know, telling Putin things. And Putin, you know, comes out of the FSB, out of the KGB of the Soviet era, and he knows the way that, you know, 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, you know, picking things up from people. You know, I've taken part in
all of these meetings with him, gone flowers '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 beyond the back of most of
his security establishment. - You think so? - [Fiona] Oh, I think
it's pretty apparent. - Oh, 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 gonna wait there. So I give this long explanation, I've gotta get to the point. And then I've gotta
then choose for myself, what's the information
I'm gonna impart to you. After the 20 things that I
think are important, you know, okay, I've got 20 minutes. Maybe I only suddenly get two minutes, maybe, you know, you get called out. Yeah and somebody, you know, kind of interrupts, something happens. I'm gonna get one minute, two minutes. - Yeah.
- 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, gonna watch him in action. He's gonna 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're, you know, they've prepared a, you know, a nice sort of fulsome, you
know, PowerPoint like approach. We never even got there.
- Yeah. - 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 gonna be kind of impatient. 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 thoughts of like, oh God, what's the main thing? - Yeah.
- And they go and they start, well, Vladimir, Vladimir Merevic, 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 on 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- - Oh, I think he pretty much thought it, because I think he thought that, you know, kind of Zelenskyy wasn't very popular. There was an awful lot of, you know, pro-Russian sentiment in
whatever way he thinks that is because people have Russian speakers and that, you know,
they're kind of, you know, in polling that, 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 of 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 Donbas before about being a kind of melting pot when, you know, they tried the same thing
in Donbas, Donetsk, Luhansk, 'cause they tried in Crimea in
2014, didn't kind of pan out. In fact, you know, a whole wall 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 ferment, 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 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. I can remember he comes out of the, Andropov levy as it's called, the kind of cohort of people who come under 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, 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, Zelenskyy would run away. Yanukovych run 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 'cause 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, the way that people feel about who they are in a certain set
of circumstances of place. - But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is unlike anything that he was ever involved with. So I wouldn't even-
- But I don't think he thought it would be, you know, because it's 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 it's, I mean, this isn't going from- - This isn't Chechnya,
this isn't, you know, kind of Syria or for example, yeah. - This is a major nation.
- Exactly. - Like, 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, we were doing a lot of
research on, you know, what was happening in, you know, the former Soviet Union at the time, 'cause 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 certainly
had other opportunities in other windows in 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. 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, 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 wanna go
along with that at all. And 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 locked West, not East. You know, it depends on where you are. Not just in Lviv, you know,
or somewhere like that but also in Kyiv. And Kharkiv, you know, was kind of predominantly
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 southern
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, Zelenskyy,
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 'em, 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 'em will say, they will agree with a prediction that the government will
flee, would collapse. And the country won't
unite around the cause because of the factions, because of all the
different parties involved, because of 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. You know, so there's kind
of a bit of a flip there. I mean, obviously Afghanistan, but you know, 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, right, try
to, you know, prop up, you know, kind of or reinstall,
you know, a leader there. Syria, you were in there to, you know, help your guy Bashar al-Assad, you know, turn away the opposition. Chechnya was a debacle. The Chechens fought back big time. And it was only by dint of, you know, horrible, violent,
persistence and ruthlessness and nasty dirty tricks that, you know, kind of Putin prevailed there. And then, you know, you
wonder did he prevail? Because what happened, you know, Chechnya sometimes describes the most independent part
of the Russian Federation, and Ramzan Kadyrov, you know,
plays power games in Moscow. Yeah, his predecessors, even his father and others
wouldn't have done that. Akhmad Kadyrov, and you know, before that, Dudaev and Maskhadov. I mean, they were willing
to make a compromise, but, you know, they
wouldn't have had, you know, the same position that Kadyrov has had. So, you know, 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 say that, you know, 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, you know, so much kind of support
for this in the right way. I mean, I have Russian
friends again, I say, "But look what, you know,
was happening in Donetsk. Look what was, you know, the Ukrainians were doing to our guys. You know, look what was
happening to Russian speakers." You know, we were defenders, we were not, you know,
we are not invaders. I think, you know, again, the special military
operation, you know, idea, now I think it's flipping obviously in the way that with
the war going on there. But Putin wasn't, you know, 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 know, 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, the point rally round and,
you know, World War I, that the fell apart. I mean, the Czar 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- - 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- - 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. - [Fiona] Yeah. No, 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, you know, we should
treat very cautiously. It doesn't mean that, you know, history repeats or even rhymes, you know, 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 was used to wonder like how many books can be written
on the French Revolution or even on the Russian Revolution. - [Lex] Yeah. - You know, I studied with Richard Pipes, I remember he was really offended after he'd written his
great, mighty usurpers 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, you know. It's like that might be, you know, 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
author on Russian history not just, you know, reading
Lomonosov for, you know, Russian historians on Russian history. Because you might see something from a very different perspective. And look in 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 United States made
a massive mistake in Vietnam and that for some reason
sprung a thought in my head. Has 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 is divided. I mean, I dunno what's successful, but, you know, kind of, I mean, there was a, a
solution found that, you know, some people promoting, you know, in this case as well of a sort of division and a, 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, Frances, and, you know, kind of assist 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 for to, you know, overturn the Holocaust and
all of the kind of things you kind of wish it would been fought for, but it was because of Pearl Harbor and, you know, the Japanese pulling in. But, and you know, 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. Look, that's kind of gonna
be a problem for Putin, and that's why there
is a problem for Putin. All of his explanations of
being questioned, you know, started off on NATO or
this or that or the other. And, you know, kind of
all 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 in earth the United
States was in Vietnam. I mean, even that kind
of happened in Britain in the 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 military
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 open 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
pre-unilaterally of Kosovo. And it also comes in the
wake of what 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 as 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 defense policy basically has all kinds of
connections with NATO at, you know, various different levels in 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 communautaire and it just transforms
a 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, well, 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 settlements 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 remanage commonwealth of independent states. And in the early 1990s when Ukraine became an independent state, it inherited 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, I was a scientist and, you know, kind of technically it
would've 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, sort of 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, you
know, 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 its sort of
devolution of authority. It had the war in Chechnya, which Yeltsin stupidly
sparked off in 1994. You had Tatastan, one of the regions, the oil rich regions, you know, basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow, you know. 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 would never want to
Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova or anywhere else to kind move away, they didn't worry that much
about Central Asia to be frank, but they know they did want, you know, the core states in
their view to come back. And Moldova was part of
that, even 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 as part Central Asia back in the fold as close as possible. So anything that gave those countries an alternative was seen as negative. It, you know, 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, 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 in a mutual defense pact,
why are you guys not paying? You know, why does the
US 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 you know, the 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 is
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 just like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Euro Missile Crisis. It's basically just saying, you know, I want to go back to when the Soviet Union in 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 of security. We've had a war, we've had the Cold War, now we've got another war,
we've got a real war, hot war, we've got a war in Ukraine. It should be the United States and Russia that sought this out. So this is where we see the United States waffling about as well, trying to kinda 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 and 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 bricks 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, a strong man to a 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 gonna 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. 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, where people, you know, say this and people do advocate
one thing or over another, that they're, you know, it's operating this. There's a lot of mirror imaging, thinking that, you know, we are 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 be 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. - 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. - [Fiona] Yeah, but other people do too. I mean, there's always,
you know, kind of a check. I mean, again. - You believe in the tension
of ideas that every idea- - 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 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, fears 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 some other think. We've gotta have strategic
empathy about Putin as well. We've gotta 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 gotta understand that. We've gotta 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 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, 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 that 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 are
operating now as well, right? You are asking an awful lot of questions. Your questions also betray,
you know, often at 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, you
know, the other person. - [Lex] Yeah. - 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 an 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 this sort of the meetings
we've had with Putin, he just ends up in sort of 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, what about-ism. I mean, he'll often say, "Well you are 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's thinking about this particular moment in
time and why he thinks it. - Yeah. The what about-ism is a
failure case I think that shows from all the interviews
I've seen 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's, 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 there
aspects that I'm not aware of leading up to the invasion, he seems to be less willing to have a charismatic back and forth dialogue. - Yeah. An open discussion. You know, actually, I mean, you know, I said, you asked me
before about, you know, that issue of trust and he often says he only trusts himself. And I said, you know,
he's often, you know, distrustful of people, but he does trust some
people for certain things where he knows it's
within their competence. - [Lex] Yeah. - So he has people he trusts to do things 'cause you know, he knows they'll do them and he knows that they'll do them well, which is why, you know,
he has his, you know, old buddies from, you know, St. Petersburg because he's known for a very long time and he knows that they want, you know, 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, you know, some of the people in the
military that he, you know, 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 and outside. And he moves them around. You know, he kind of, okay, you know, he gives them multiple chances to redeem themselves if they don't, it's not like he hasn't 'em done in. I mean, yeah, there is a
lot of that in the system. But are the people that he is
worked with for a long time and he, he moves them
around to something else, perhaps where they can do less harm. Although, you know, we've often see that he has quite a small cadre of people that he's reliant on and often, you know, 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 you was saying
here, more pragmatic. And I think, you know, if you were engaged with him in Russian, where you are actually literally
speaking the same language, 'cause there's so much
lost in translation. I used to jump outside out my skin listening to some of the phone calls because, you know, the way
that they kind of relayed, you know, with an interpreter- - Oh, 'cause you listening
to the translation? - Trying to listening to them. No, because I know I'm listening to the Russian and the translation - And the translation's-
- It's happening, you know, in real time. And having been at a
Translators Institute, it's really difficult.
- Yeah. - Look, an interpreter
is trained in the moment to do something, you know, the sinkhronnyy perevod
or 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, you know, it's sinkhronnyy perevod in Russian, you are 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, you know, what
translators do is they, you know, they take this little short
note like journalists do. And afterwards, you know, they've just been caught up in the moment and they haven't got the big picture. Consecutive translation is different, you know, kind of you're trying to convey the whole mood of like
big chunks of dialogue that have already been there. But, you know, sometimes you might not get that right either. And it breaks up the
flow of the discussion. - [Lex] It's terrible. - And often it's, you know, the kind of the person who translates, it's different, you know. Some of our best translators is a woman, but, you know, hearing a woman's voice, you know, translating a guy who has a particular guy's way of speaking and a macho way of speaking
and a crude way of speaking, you know, be that Putin
or I've seen that happen with Erdogan, the president
of Turkey, you know, and it gets translated
by a much more refined, you know, female speaker, you've
just lost the whole thing. And you know, 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 turned
to the same high standards they used to be in the past.
- Yes. - And you just got, you lose the nuance, you lose the feel. You know, you almost need, you know, kind of the interpretive actor, you know, doing, you know, the kind of
the interpretation for that. You need to match it as much as you can in the way that you, you
know, do voiceovers in film. The best way to talk to Putin is one-on-one in his own language. I mean, I have a really great friend here who is one of the best
interpreters of Putin, is often asked by the, you know, the media to interpret for him. He was at the institute that I was. I mean, I know him from
that, that kind of period. And he is just excellent. Just like Pavel Palazhchenko
was absolutely phenomenal at interpreting Gorbachev. Now, he didn't always
interpret him accurately 'cause Gorbachev made
lots of grammatical gaffes and sometimes was, you know, Gorbachev himself would joke
that Palazhchenko, you know, spoke better for Gorbachev
than Gorbachev could himself. - [Lex] Yeah. - But Putin is actually quite precise and careful in the word 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. - [Lex] Cross facial expressions that go along with that.
- 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, you know, kind of uses irony. Just some of it's just lost
and it needs to be conveyed. - The depth of humor and wit, I met quite a few like
political leaders like that and they speak only Russian
when I was traveling 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. - [Fiona] Yeah. - Obama had a wit and an intelligence, but like he would smile
as just said something that add a lot to it. Like, that he's trolling
you or he's being sarcastic or like, me converting it 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, you know, kind of just in Russian, not looking at any of the, you know, the subtitles or anything, and it's just watching the way that his body language is at the time when he is saying things, the way that you smirk, he'll sneer, he'll laugh, he'll ad lib, you know, kind of from something that obviously kind of, you know, wasn't
there on the prepared speech. And it's really critical. And you know, kind of a lot, some people speak, you know, like Trump, it 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, you know, it's revving people up, it's the kind of slogans. And Putin, it's, you know, he's conveying a lot in
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, you know, been
at many of these sessions, it's been hours of him pairing questions and it's like watching a boxer sparring, you know, a kind of training belt. 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, you know, the issues that he's often covered has been interesting,
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 as hell
gonna believe it eventually. - Well, you convince
yourself over time, yeah. Look, the longer you are
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, you
know, people through history have moved from kind of
being kind of left wing and you know, in the
perspectives to hard right. They kind of have a 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 Piece 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 in individuals at 18. You know, we don't know anything. You know something but not everything. I mean, and obviously the
younger context, you know, the kind of the way that
you kind of grow up, the place you grow 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, if 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, kind of, Tajikistan and he goes to China and
he does this and that. And 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 to sort of, you know, he needed to get out more and do something different. - You had an interesting
point you've made that both Zelenskyy 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. - Yeah. Because their election's gonna be pretty much at the same time. - As the US election also.
- Yeah. - Oh, theirs will be before. I mean, 'cause it's
sometime in that, you know, early part of the year of
the presidential election. - Yeah. And also, I don't know if
you know about US elections, but they actually last
way longer than year. - [Fiona] Well, we're
in it now, aren't we? You know, already,
- We're already starting. So there's gonna be a significant overlap. - [Fiona] 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. Then 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 annexing Crimea was, look what happened to his ratings. - [Lex] Yeah. - 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 were post
Putin on some other things. "Crimea was, you know,
(speaks in Russian)" 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 mulch operation, he was gonna 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 gonna be. He would think the cakewalk, the shoe in of the next
presidential election. I mean, last time around he had to invite a bit of competition with his person who's reputed to be his
goddaughter, Ksenia Sobchak, you know, for a bit of, you know, kind of entertainment
for people, you know. 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 gonna 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 gonna be, again, a new union of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in some, you know, fashion
and he'd 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 firm, 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 sort of 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 in an opposition figure or somebody who might be more
palatable from, you know, your perspective looking from the West, they're not always gonna be, you know, what you think they are. Now 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 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, 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, at one part I remember he said,
"Don't feed the caucuses." 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,
and then 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 is 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 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 gonna 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 is 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, the 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
gonna be radically different. 'Cause look, Gorbachev, I
mean, he was so different from Andropov and Chernenko
and others as the 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 wanna 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 of the United States that we know is the Cuban Missile Crisis, and eventually, you know, gets removed. You know, we are looking
at what's happening in the United Kingdom right now. You know, they've just churn
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. And 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's the kind of person,
if he's got an instrument, 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 Surovikin 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, well, you know, he obviously
meant the precedent of using nuclear weapons, of course. Which of course, we would then say, well, we showed then
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 anywhere. Did that really, you know, kind of change the minds of
the Japanese high command? I mean, there's all kind of
books 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 of 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, scholarships suggesting it did to the end of the war. But a lot of the big bombing campaigns, the destruction actually prolonged wars because they made people fight back 'cause 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'll 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's 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. 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 - That's actually- - Of getting what he wants, you know? - 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. Yeah, exactly. - I think he has two tools, right? So one is, he actually the
actual use of nuclear weapons, and then the threat of the- - [Fiona] Oh, the threat is very effective - And the more real you make the threat. - [Fiona] That's right. - So it's like the more you
approach the actual use, like get very close using it. - And actually he's already
using Chernobyl, Zaporizhzhia and then Yuzhnoukrainsk,
the other nuclear reactor. So he is using civilian nuclear
reactors as a dirty bomb. So, you know, it's ironic
that he has Sergei Shoigu, his defense minister calling people, obviously 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 you troops
through, you know, for example, or shelling, you know, the Chernobyl plant and the sarcophagus
and putting it at risk? And Zaporizhzhia, 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 Zaporizhzhia in particular, obviously, it was third of
Ukraine's power generation or some, you know, really high percentage. I'd have to go back and, you
know, take a look at that. But that's a two for, 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 that 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 that 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 is got a lot of people
obviously 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. - And also don't, these
things happen very quickly? - Well, there's also signaling
and signs of movement there. I mean, I wanna be very, you know, kind of careful about this. But then the thing is, it's also very important that we do this with other nuclear powers. So look, the other thing that's different from how it might have been in the past, and particularly different from the Cuban Missile Crisis
and the Euro Missile Crisis, we're not the only nuclear players. China, it has emerging
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 here. 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 tri-region side of Belarus and Kazakhstan, you've gotta wonder was it wise for them to give it up? We were worried about, you
know, kind of loose nukes, nuclear weapons, you know,
kind of getting out of hand. Proliferation at the time. We wanted fewer nuclear
powers. Russia wanted that too. Now we're gonna 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 USSR 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 and the United Kingdom in particular have, you know, basically some
responsibility and obligation going back to 1994 when
they promised Ukraine that gave up the nuclear weapons, that 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 your South Korea, Japan, you know, any other country that's kind of worrying about your neighbors and you know, what might happen to you? And just like India and
Pakistani both like, whoa, you know, we've gotta kind of keep our strategic nuclear balance here. Everything is up for question. Saudis will want a nuclear weapon. 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 now to 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 on the verge of joining and 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 is 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 you can do as well here. It's not just, you know, again, this is civilian nuclear threat of blowing up, you know,
one of the reactors. Now it's gotta 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, or he can end it in 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 is confident
he can get rid of Zelenskyy 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, you know, 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 I know Putin's thinking, yeah, great. I've, you know, destroyed the
infrastructure of Ukraine. - [Lex] 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 right, he's done it
at other points as well. We've just not paid attention, but he pretty was pretty
explicit in 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 then, you know,
the question has to be, do we really kind of think he's gonna play fair after that when he is kind of also shown that he can leverage that? - [Lex] 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. And China is very quiet right now - 'Cause they're watching what happens. I mean, for President Xi, you know, he is trying to consolidate his power even further after the party Congress, but he doesn't wanna 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 is 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. - Well, 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 has 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 ne any negotiation is 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 Fins
did in the Winter war, which the Fins were devastated
by the Winter war as well but they pushed them back. Now the Fins lost a lot of territory, lost Karelia and you know,
huge squares of territory. But they gotta 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. - Yes.
- But, you know, is, And that's the challenge. Now, they, 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
servant mentality, you know, going all the way back
to when the Muscovites were the bagmen for the, you know, the hold 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 older, you know. All you have to go down is, go and see Tchaikovsky's "Andrei Roublev." 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 wanna go in a
different direction, so be it, but I'm gonna make you suffer. Remember when Khodorkovsky
got out of the penal colony, when Putin let him out, eventually, he said, "He 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 lot of destruction in, that's what Assad was like
in Syria like his father, you destroy 'cause 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 Mau Mau, you
know, in Kenya, you know, up until recent times, brutality, teaching people, you know, you're teaching 'em 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, you know, 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, you know, we've
fully internalized them of, you know, things that
we've done, you know, kind of the past in the United States. We ideally are trying to do better. And most of Europe's trying
to do better as well. Think about France in 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 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. - Yeah.
- 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. And my grandfather who'd
fought in World War I, wouldn't speak to my parents
when they sent me on a, I mean, hadn't fought in World War II. He fought in World War
I, 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, it takes a long time to get over that. But you do, I mean, 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? 'Cause 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 gotta 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 with 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, you know, 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 projects that were funded by the Carnegie Corporation
of the United States under the then presidency
of David Hamburg, who was a scientist. And 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 them, like the veto power of
the permanent powers on the UN Security Council. But we can change that.
You've just gotta have a will. And I do think out there, there are sufficient people with a will and we've just gotta 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, that we shouldn't let
this crisis go to waste. And something else can come out of this. Just like in Ukraine,
like we've worried before about corruption in Ukraine,
the influence of the oligarchs. We've gotta run 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 is 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, you know, 57. I'm not that old, but I'm not that young. But we have to work together with younger and older people. - You remind me,
- You've got to work together in coalitions of, you
know, across generations. - You remind me of kids
who just graduated college and say, "I feel old" and say, "Yeah, no." - I don't actually feel old,
but it is a number, age. And you know, when, you know, you kind of think about when I was- - I thought, you don't like math. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like things like that, yeah. But I find it interesting. But you know what? 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." - Yeah.
(both laughing) - And that's 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 in college, thinking of how they can have a big, positive impact on the world? - Look, we all have a voice, right? We all have agency. We all actually have the
ability to do something. And you can, you know, start
small in your local community or you know, even in your own classroom just helping, you know, somebody else out or speaking up and advocating on behalf of things. You know, when I was, I was like about 11 years old, I got involved with other
kids on Save the Whales. You know, we had all
this, you know, kind of, we were hardly Greta Thunberg, but, you know, we kind of got together in a kind of network writing to people and, you know, trying to raise money to, you know, 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, you know, it was kind
of a way of organizing and, you know, 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, you know, 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 know, you've been, you
know, trying to do this with your podcast, you know, kind of give people a broader a voice, give them a kind of platform and, you know, get them to
join in with other people. And, you know, one of the things that I've been trying to do is, you know, kind of go and talk to just as
many people as I possibly can and say, "Look, you know, we
can all do something here." We can all, you know, lend out 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 when we see that, you
know, something is wrong. And we can try to, you know,
explain things to people. And what I'm trying to do at the moment is just sort of explain, you know, what I've learned about things and, you know, hope that that helps people make informed judgements of their own and that, you know, kind of
maybe take things further and learn something more. It's like kind of like
building up upon, you know, the knowledge, you know,
that I have, you know, to try to impart to others. And everybody can do that different ways. You can kind of reach back, you know. If you're 14, help somebody who's seven. If you're 21, help somebody who's 14. You know, kind of if in, you know, the kind of my age now, I'm
always trying to, you know, reach back and, you know,
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, you know, 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
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. There always were. I mean, there were lots of points where I was just despondent. But then, you know, I'd meet somebody who would just suddenly
turn things around. Was this luck or was I out
there looking for it, you know? Sometimes, you know, if you're open and receptive to, you know, kind of hearing something
from someone else. I mean I, you know, there often times where I felt so despondent,
you know, 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, you
know, I was sitting on a bench, it 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? You know, it can't be that bad, can it?" And it was just this human embrace. It's like somebody, you know, just basically reaching out to me that snapped me out of it. And I thought, you know,
here's somebody just, you know, she didn't know who I was. She just felt really bad
that I was, you know, sitting, you know, crying. And, I mean, I can't even remember what it was about anymore, you know. Now it just seems inconsequential. At the time I probably
thought my life was at an end. You know, sometimes
people making eye contact with even the street and
saying something to you can kind of pull you out of something. And you know, it's kind of a, I think you just have to open
yourself up to the prospect of not everyone's bad. Just like you were saying before, that there's, you know, good in everybody even during, you know, that really difficult
period of impeachment. You know, 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, you know. Kind of when people are kind
of forgetting who they are or, you know, the context
in their operating, there's always something
that can, you know, 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. Look, when I was a kid, I mean, you know, things like mentioned before, I got bullied, you know, kind of. Again, and I tried to understand
why are they doing this? One of the most amazing things
that happened, you know, really, was my dad was a
pretty incredible person and he would always open
my eyes to something. And 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, you know, deprived area. And we'd go to this housing estate, public housing place that's not too far away from where I live. And it's really, you know,
kind of one of the most rundown places in an
already rundown place. And my dad like, knocks on the door. And I said, "What are we doing dad?" And I see, he says, "Well,
we're going off to, you know, we're gonna visit somebody,
an old family friend." I think even, you know,
a distant relative. We knock on the door and this old man answers the
door and he says, "Oh, Alfie." My dad's name was Alf, Alfie. You know, kind of, "Oh, fancy seeing you. We haven't seen you. Come on in. Have a cup of tea. What you doing?" He said, "Oh, I'm just
walking past my daughter. We're going for a trip, 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. - Yeah.
- And after that, she never bullied me again. I mean, we didn't even talk 'cause there was a connection made. And suddenly she realized
that her grandfather, who was the only person
she had, knew my dad. And there was some, they were friends or
they were even family. Some, you know, kind
of relationship there. I mean, I was related to
half of North of England. I had no idea how we were related. You know, everybody was some relative because people have lived
there for generations together 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's 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 up there saying that they want this
and that to happen to me. - Well, thank you for the kindness and the empathy still carry in your heart. I can see it through all the, 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 and 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 are a world expert in. So don't mess it up. - No, I know. But that's why I was saying
to everybody out there, let's just keep it together, right? - [Lex] Yeah.
(Fiona laughing) Exactly. - Let's just keep it together. - Your words have a
lot of power right now, so it's a really, really tricky time. - Yeah.
- So thank you so much, given how valuable your time
is to sit down with me today. It was an honor and amazing.
- 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 and
I hope to see you next time.