Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump

Lex Fridman Podcast #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. She has served the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump. She has made it to the White House from humble beginnings in the north of England, a story she tells in her book, "There's nothing for you here." And now a quick second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Mizanameen for style, calm for meditation, Athletic Greens for multivitamins and happiness, and Element for electrolytes and also happiness. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. 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I'm going to drink some Element to make sure I'll have the electrolytes I need in case I'm feeling pretty good about myself and I'm going to do like more than 10 miles, 10, 12, 14, 15. One of these days, I'm just going to keep running. I'm going to I'm going to pull a Forrest Gump. I'm just going to keep running. There's not going to be a podcast, all my responsibilities, the people waiting for me on meetings, all the stuff at MIT in my personal life. Tweets all of that, it's just going to disappear, and there's going to be me with a beard running somewhere in the middle of the country, and the only thing I'll have with me. Besides, maybe coffee and the diners I'll stop along the way is Element. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drink element l m n t dot com slash lex. This is a 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 beginnings in a coal mining town in northeast England. So, what were some formative moments in your young life that made you the woman you are today? I was born in 1965, and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already. And 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, on the same kind of age. I mean, you had a lot of people, you know, 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 going to go down the mine like everybody else in your family," and that he didn't really have any other qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So he worked in a steel works that didn't work out a 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 got to have one, you know. You've got to have some qualifications. The world is changing. It's changing really quickly, and for you to kind of keep up with it, you're going to have to get educated and find a way out of this. I'm very early on. My father had basically said to me, "There's nothing for you here. You're going to 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 at age 16 left school and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife. I had other relatives had 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 probably have to leave. So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years as 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 want to be, where you want to go. Yeah, there. 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 want to do?" Boys might say, "I wanted to be a fireman," you know, or you got you know kind of at one point as a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse in a little nurse's 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 famous story at the time about a vet called James Harriet. It became here in the United States as well, and was a lot of a TV mini series. He'd written a book, and he was the vet for my one of my great aunt's dogs, and people were always talking about him. And I thought, oh, I could be a vet. And then one day I saw one of the local vets with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field, and he got his hand stuck and the cow was kicking him, and I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe not actually. No, I don't think I want to be a vet. So I cycle through all of these things about okay, I could get an education, but the whole sense was you have 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 going to get ahead and go to elite institutions. Look, you can get an education, you don't have to be held back by your circumstances. But if you do get an education, it's a privilege and you need to do something with it. So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do? Okay, an education is a qualification. It's to do something. Most people around me, I didn't, 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, 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'd tell you if everyone had had my mom as a as a mother, there'd be no there'd be no reproduction on the planet. It was just these grim horrific stories of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, oh my god, you know, what, please stop. So I thought, well, you know, I don't necessarily want to go in that um, in that direction, but it was the timing that really cinched things for me. I was very lucky that the region that I grew up County Durham, despite the massive decline, deindustrialization and the complete collapse of the local government system, around me still meant money for education, and they also paid for exchanges. We had exchange programs with cities in Germany and France, also in Russia in 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 Warsaw. Basically provoked by the Euro missile crisis, so the stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War, and the 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. 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 threads the day after we had all these public service announcements telling us to seek sanctuary or cover in the inevitability of a nuclear blast. And 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, and said, 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 we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs, a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter. I mean, it's all just you know totally nuts. I'll go, or you had to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside, and I thought, well, this this isn't going to work. And one of my great uncles who had fought in World War II said, well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona. Why don't you go and study Russian? Try to figure it out, figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up because you know during the go talk to them. Exactly during World War II, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union had all been wartime allies, and my uncle Charlie thought, well, there's something gone wrong here. Maybe you can figure it out, and as you said, go talk to them. So I thought, okay, I'll study Russian. So that's really how this came about. I thought, well, is applying education, I'll just do my very best to understand everything I possibly can about the Russian language and the Soviet Union, and I'll see what I can do. And I thought, well, maybe I could become a translator. So I had visions of myself sitting around, you know, listening to things in a big headset and in a basically translating pipes at some you know future arms control summit. So how did the journey continue with learning Russian? I mean, this early dream of being a translator and thinking, how can I actually help understand or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict that threatens the existence of the human species? How did actually continue? Well, I mean, I read everything I was actually possibly could about you know nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and you know, started to try to teach myself you know Russian a little bit. It was always in context of nuclear war. It was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point, but also in historical context because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies in World War II, so I tried to understand all of that. And also, you know, I like many other people, I read you know Russian literature in translation. I'd read War and Peace, and you know, I'd love the book actually. I mean, particularly the you know the story parts of it. I wasn't one really at that 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. Though now I appreciate it more, but when I was about 14, I was like, this man needed an editor. You know, could you have just got on with the story? What some amazing story? What an incredible you know kind of book this is. I still think he needs an editor. But well, I think his wife tried, didn't she? But he got he got quite upset with her, and then I kind of thought to myself, well, how do I how do I study Russian because there were very few schools in my region, you know, given the impoverishment of the region, where you could study Russian, so I would have to take Russian from scratch. And this is where things get really quite interesting because there were opportunities to study Russian at universities, but I would need to have first of all an intensive Russian language course in the summer, and I didn't have the money for that. And the period is around the miners' strike in the United Kingdom in 1984. Now, the miners of County Durham had very interestingly had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbas going back to the 1920s. 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 Huzevka because it was established by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales to help you know kind of develop the coal mines there and also the steel works and others that you know were 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 the Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany or miners in Poland, sent money in solidarity to the miners of County Durham, and there have been these exchanges I said going back and forth since the 1920s formal exchanges between miners, you know, the region, the 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 the miners of County Durham had actually pooled 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 well-being 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 a little trellis 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 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 of the Durham miners association I got the money to study Russian for the first time before I embarked on my studies at university as you're speaking now it's reminding me that there's a different way to look both at history and a geography in a 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 in industrial that's right in the place itself yeah I mean there are places in the United States in Appalachia in West Virginia and in Pennsylvania like the Lehigh Valley that have the same sense of place and the Northeast of England you know was the cradle of the industrial revolution it was the industrial version of the 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 a population that one might say is indigenous you know might have gone back centuries there but they would have been you know in the smaller rural farming communities just like it was the same in the Northeast of England and people in the case of the Northeast of England came from Wales they came from further in the south of England the Midlands they came from Scotland they came from Ireland I have all of that heritage in my own personal background and you 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 a part 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 Russian there is the lingua franca I mean in the north of Eastern Europe 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 but they created an identity it's the same in Belfast in Ulster you know the Northern Province of of the you know the whole of the Irish island you know the part of Ireland that is still part of the United Kingdom that was also a heavily industrialized area high manufacturing mass manufacturing shipbuilding for example people came from all over there too which is why when Ireland got its independence in the United Kingdom Ulster Belfast and that whole region you know kind of clung on because it was again that melting pot it was kind of intertwined with the larger industrial economy and had a very different identity and so that you know for me growing up in such a specific place with such a special in many respects heritage gave me a different perspective on things when I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study there I actually went to a translator's institute what was then called the Modest Therese which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages I was immediately struck by how similar everything was to the North of England because it was just like one big working class culture that sort of broken out onto the national stage everything in Northern England was nationalized we had British steel British coal British rail British shipbuilding because after World War II the private sector had been devastated and the state had to step in and of course the Soviet Union is one great 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 a distortion on the way that people looked at the world do you still speak Russian I do yeah what are you talking about yeah more or less can you hear this you had easier and then that that means that what what should we say is you will think about what we are now talking about yeah it would be a big mystery for everybody and you have an advantage on me because 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 it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across a very large part of this world so there you are in 1987 an exchange student in the Soviet Union what was that world world like well that was absolutely fascinating in that period because it's the period that just around the time of the peak of Perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president well it wasn't quite president at that point it's the secretary general of the Soviet 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 just within you know kind of weeks of them about to sign that which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the euro missile crisis by finally having agreement on you know basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces and also at this point Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up so we got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before not just you know in Moscow which is where I was studying at the translator's institute but to the Caucasus to Central Asia went all the way to Habsburgs in the the Russian Far East all the way around you know kind of Moscow and there was at this point it was also the Khrushchev which has become very important now this is the anniversary the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of of Russia which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin but you know 988 because 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 I 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 kind of growing up in a you know mining region you know there's very limited opportunities for this kind of thing I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir my parents signed me up for probably everything you know they possibly could education wise but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this so you know I was kind of astounded by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience that one could have in Moscow but the main thing was I was really struck by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs because this was Moscow you know I I got this image of what it would look like I was quite to be honest terrified at first about what I would see there even at 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 of my teenage years just disappeared because it's just ordinary people in ordinary places not doing great this is the period of you know what they call deficit nevremia you know so the period of deficits but there was no food in the shops there was you know very little in terms of commodities because the supply and demand parts of the economic equation were out of whack because this was a total central planning you know you'd go into you know a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pair of boots all in the same size in the same color I actually looked out because one size was in this Hungarian boot shop that was right next to where my whole 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 and no men's boots at all you know because there was been a nervous 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 because everybody lost their jobs there was massive employment you know when I went off to university in 1984 90% youth unemployment in the UK meaning that when kids left school they didn't have something else to go on to unless they got to university or vocational training or an apprenticeship and most people were still looking you know kind of months out of leaving school and so shops were closing because people didn't have any money you know I had 50% male unemployment in some of the towns as the steel works closed down and the the wagon works of 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 sinkholes open up in the street balconies fall off buildings you know one accident after another and then there was you know this real kind of sense even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope of the Gorbachev period a real sense of the this 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 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 were so many debates that Gorbachev had sparked off about how to reform the country how to put it on a different path that you know no one was in agreement and it was especially all these fights and deep 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 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 essentially ending it and Gorbachev you know so basically I'm there at the the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation and thinking about the future and within a couple of years it's all kind of gone and it's on a different track entirely well I wonder if we reran the 20th century a thousand times if how many times the Soviet Union would collapse yeah I wonder about that too and I also wonder about what would have happened if it didn't collapse and Gorbachev had found a different direction I mean 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 that's kind of the strength of America there's these little laboratories of ideas until though that they don't keep together I mean I've had colleagues who have described what's happening in the West right now as a kind of soft secession with states you know going off in their own direction and the center in which they well you know these kinds of conceptions that we have now divisions between red and blue states because of the fracturing of our politics and I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible in somewhere like the United States or 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 because look I mean we know from the Soviet Union and the Soviet period and from where you're from in originally Ukraine that language is not the main signifier of identity and that identity can take all kinds of of other forms that's really interesting I mean but there has to be a deep grievance of some kind if you took a poll in any of the states in the United States I think a very small minority of people would want to actually secede even in Texas where I spend a lot of my time I just I think that there is a common kind of pride of nation you know there's a lot of people complain about government and about how the country is going the way people complain about the weather when it's raining they say oh this stupid weather it's raining again but really what they mean is we're in the smock together there's a together there 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 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 a really good book called Collapse by Vladislav Zubok who is a professor at London School of Economics and LSE and Zubok is pretty much my age and he's from you know the former Soviet Union he's Russian and I mean he describes it very quite uply about how it was kind of the elites you know that that basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart and there is a risk of that you know here as well when you get party Zion politics and people forgetting you know they're Americans and they are all in this together like the lot of the population thing but they think that their own you know narrow party Zion or ideological precepts you know camp for more and in the Soviet case of course was also a power player 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 the heads of Russia Ukraine and Belarus who then you know got rid of you know basically the central the central figure of of Mikhail Gorbachev it would be a little difficult to do that the dynamic is not the same but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up in the late 1980s and the early 90s and I was I spent you know a lot of time in the in Russia as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus Central Asia and you know other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union but that you you kind of see the same elite divisions here in the United States pulling in you know in different 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 it certainly wasn't when I first came to the US in 1989 I didn't honestly in 1989 when I first came here I don't know anybody's political affiliation I mean I rarely knew their religious affiliation and you know obviously race was a was a major phenomenon here that was a shock to me when I when I first came but many of the kind of the class regional geographic you know kind of political dimensions that I've seen in other places I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now and you take a lot of pride to this day of being nonpartisan that said so you served for the George W Bush Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations always specializing in Eurasia in Russia you were the top presidential adviser 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 nonpartisan 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 I've always found American politics somewhat confounding because both the Democratic and the Republican Party are pretty big tents some of their coalitions you know in Europe it's actually kind of in some respects easier to navigate the parameters of political parties because you 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 of 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