Lex Fridman Podcast - #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill, a presidential adviser 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 two second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Ms. In a Main for Style, Calm for Meditation, let it greens for multivitamins and

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Starting point is 00:06:01 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill. 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 North East 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, he'd lost his job multiple times.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Every coal mine he worked in was closing down. He was looking constantly for other work. And he had no qualifications because at Edge 14, he'd gone down the mines. His father'd 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, pay you're going to go down the mind like everybody else in your family.

Starting point is 00:07:16 And then he didn't really have any of the qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So we worked in a steelworks, that didn't work out, a brickworks, that closed down. And then it went to work in the local hospital, part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom as a porter, an orderly, especially somebody who'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.

Starting point is 00:07:46 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,

Starting point is 00:08:04 I wouldn't. Actually, in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy. There was no expectation that I would go into industry. There was some kind of idea that maybe I, if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse. My mother was a midwife. And so she did age 16, left school and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife.

Starting point is 00:08:24 I had other relatives that had gone to teach in local schools. So there was an idea that women could get educated and there was a kind of a range of things that you could do. But the expectation then was go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave. So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years, I was trying to find my way through life and looking forward.

Starting point is 00:08:52 First of all, what does that even look like, getting educated, given the context of that place? You don't know, there's a whole world of mystery out there. So how do you figure out what to actually do out there? But was there moments, formative moments, either challenging or just inspiring, where you wondered about what you want to be, where you want to go? Yeah, there were, 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

Starting point is 00:09:19 blue collar backgrounds, they're like, 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, there was a little girl. I wanted to be a nurse, and I had a little nurse as a uniform like my mother. I didn't really know what that meant. But I used to go around pretending to be a nurse. I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy. And I used to read this.

Starting point is 00:09:38 And that was one of the formative ideas. We also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area. And I'd be out in the fields all the time, and I'd watch farmers with their animals, and I'd see vets coming along, and watching people deal with a livestock. And there was a kind of a famous story at the time about a vet called James Harriet. It became here in the United States, as well, was a TV miniseries, he'd written a book, and he was the vet for one of my great aun 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

Starting point is 00:10:13 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 cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education, but the whole sense was you had to apply a education. It wasn't an education for education sick, it was an education to do something. I'm going to 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 And now we was a member of Parliament.

Starting point is 00:10:45 He himself had come from a really hard scrawble background and 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.

Starting point is 00:11:01 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, it's a qualification, it's to do something. Most people around me, I didn't, I knew you didn't have careers. I mean, my dad didn't really have a career. He had jobs. My mom, you know, a 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 tell you if everyone had had my mum as a mother

Starting point is 00:11:37 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 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, be still maintain, money for education. And they also paid for exchanges. And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany,

Starting point is 00:12:19 in France, also in Russia, in Kostroma, near Yaroslavl, for example, no textile town similar down in its kind of region, but quite historic in the Russian context. In fact, the original birthplace of the Roman off-dinisty in Kostroma, just as Kantidorim, it was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context. And so there was an idea that I could go on exchange, as I could learn languages, I studied German, I studied French. And then in 1983, there was the War Skare, basically provoked by the Euro-Mistile 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 the Sierra Missile Crisis over SS-20 and Pershing Missiles went on from 1977, so when

Starting point is 00:13:10 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 after the fact, but the tension was palpable, but what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions

Starting point is 00:13:39 of a series of exercises, Operation Able Archer, that the United States was conducting and actually thought that the United States might be preparing for a first nuclear strike. And that then set of a whole set of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union. Eventually it was recognized that all of this was really based on misperceptions. And of course, that later led to negotiations between Gorbachev and Reagan for the intermediate nuclear forces, the INF Treaty. But in 1983, that tension was just acute. And for as a teenager, we were basically being prepped the whole time for the inevitability

Starting point is 00:14:18 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 and the inevitability of a nuclear blast. And my house was so small, they said, look for a room without a window. There were no rooms without windows. My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window. Instead of there was a nuclear flash, we'd have to get down on the floor, not look up for the curtains, but help. And we'd like this ridiculous dud.

Starting point is 00:14:47 And we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs, or cover it under the stairs like Harry Potter. I mean, 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 isn't gonna work. And one of my great uncles, who would fought in World War II,

Starting point is 00:15:02 said, well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona. Why do you need going to study Russian? Try to figure it out. Figure out why the Russians are trying to blows up. Because during the... Go talk to them. Exactly. During World War II, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union are all being wartime allies,

Starting point is 00:15:16 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. So I thought, well, it's applying education. I'll just do my very best to understand everything I possibly can about the Russian language and the Soviet Union. And I'll see what I can do. And I thought, well, maybe I could become a translator. So I had visions of myself sitting around, you know, listening to things in a big headset. And in a best-reward translating perhaps,lating perhaps that some future arms control summits.

Starting point is 00:15:48 So how did the journey continue with learning Russian? I mean, this early dream of being a translator and thinking how can I actually help understand or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict that threatens the existence of the human species? How did it actually continue? Well, I mean, I read everything I also actually possibly heard about, you know, nuclear weapons

Starting point is 00:16:16 and nuclear war and you know, I started to try to teach myself, you know, Russian a little bit. It was a loss 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 more time allies and World War IIs were trying to understand all of that.

Starting point is 00:16:34 And also, you know, I like many other people, I read, you know, Russian literature in translation, I'd read War and Peace and I'd love the book actually. I mean, particularly the story parts of it. I wasn't one really at that time when I was a teenager. I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, in terms of his series of the great man and of history and social change, although now I appreciate it more. But when I was about 14, I was like, this man needed an editor. Could you have just gone with the story? For an amazing story, one incredible book this is.

Starting point is 00:17:04 I still think he needs an editor book. 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, given the impoverishment of the region where you could study Russian.

Starting point is 00:17:20 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 minus strike

Starting point is 00:17:41 in the United Kingdom in 1984. Now, the miners of County Durham, that very interestingly, had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbass going back to the 1920s. And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots of contacts between Bolshevik, Soviet Union, the early period after the Russian Revolution. But even before that, during the Imperial period in Russia, between the Northern England and the Russian

Starting point is 00:18:09 Empire and the Old Industrial areas. Basically, big industrial areas like the Northeast of England and places like Donbass were built up at the same time, often by the same sets of industrialists. And Danieck in the Donbass region used to be called Husevka, because it was established by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales to help develop the coal mines there, and also the steelworks and others that were peering about all the time. So I got very fascinated in all these linkages,

Starting point is 00:18:40 and famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union, I give Gini Zemyatin, worked in the shipyards in Newcastle, Pontine, and there was just this whole set of connections. And in 1984, when the miners strike took place, the miners of Donbass, along with other miners from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany or miners in Poland, sent money and solidarity to the miners of County Durham. And there'd been these

Starting point is 00:19:11 exchanges that are said going back and forth since the 1920s, formal exchanges between miners in the region and miners unions. And I heard, again from the same great uncle who told me to study Russian, that there were actually scholarships to the children of miners, and it could be former miners as well, for their education. And I should go along to the miners' hall, a place called Red Hills, where the miners of country during which actually pulled all of their resources and built up their own parliament, and their own 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 electricity, we read from the miners and all kinds of other activity supporting soccer teams and

Starting point is 00:19:59 artistic circles and writing circles, for example. people like George Orwell, you know, were involved in some of these writers circles in other parts of Britain and mine and 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 minor and they looked up his employment record on little cards, you know, kind of a little, a little trace 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 Donbass

Starting point is 00:20:46 and this money that was deposited with the miners of County Durham with the Durham Minus 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

Starting point is 00:21:07 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 by at least historically by just being a mining town and industrial. That's right, in the place itself. 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.

Starting point is 00:21:36 And the northeast of England 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

Starting point is 00:22:05 and economic connotations. And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems that the Donbass has experienced over the last 30 years. 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 have been, you know, the smaller rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the northeast of England. And people in the case of an northeast of England came from Wales, they came from Ferdinand, 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.

Starting point is 00:22:43 And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity on you from the outside that things go awry. And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in the case of Don Bass, it's a place, it's a part in many respects historically and in terms of its evolution and development over time. And particularly in the case of Russia, the Russians have tried to say, well, look, because most

Starting point is 00:23:05 people speak Russia, there is the lingua franca. In the North-Eastern England, of course, everyone spoke English, but lots of people where Irish speakers, Gallic Irish speakers, some of them might have certainly been Welsh speakers. There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh as their first language you came there, but they created an identity. It's the same in Belfast in Ulster, the northern province of the whole of the Irish island, the island 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,

Starting point is 00:23:43 which is why when Ireland got its independent simulated 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. My first one to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study there actually went to a translator's institute, what was then called the Moriss Therese, which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages.

Starting point is 00:24:22 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 broke and 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

Starting point is 00:24:41 had been devastated, and the state had to step in. And of course, the Soviet Union is one gri great big giant nationalized economy when I get there. And it's just the people's attitudes and outlooks of the same. People didn't work for themselves, they always worked for somebody else. And it had quite a distortion on the way that people looked at the world. Do you still speak Russian? I do. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:02 Russian speakers? Yeah, more than that. Can you explain this? Yeah, I do. Yeah. You speak Russian? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do.

Starting point is 00:25:09 Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do.

Starting point is 00:25:17 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across

Starting point is 00:25:26 a very large part of this world. So there you are in 1987, an exchange student in the Soviet Union. What was that world like? Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period, because it's the period that's just around the time of the peak of Perestroika, Mickael Gorbachev's role as president, well, it wasn't quite president at that point, it's 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,

Starting point is 00:26:04 it was just within weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Uremissal crisis by finally having agreement on 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 Moscow, which is where I was studying at the Transits Institute, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia, went all the way to Habarovsk in the Russian Far East,

Starting point is 00:26:39 all the way around Moscow. And at this point, it was also the Kreshein Yerus, which has become very important now, this is the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia, which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's, but in a 988, because I was there 87 to 88. And at this point, the Russian Orthodox Church

Starting point is 00:27:05 is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period. You certainly have the church stepping out as a non-governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. So that was something that I wasn't expecting to witness. Also, I mean, being in Moscow,

Starting point is 00:27:25 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'd, that the first time I got on opera, it's at the Bolshoi. And I'd never seen a ballet. I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture. You know, you're kind of growing up in a, you know, mining region, you know, there's very limited opportunities for this kind of thing you're growing up in a mining region, 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 everything they possibly could, education wise, but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this. So I was kind of astounded by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience

Starting point is 00:28:00 that one could have in Moscow. But the main thing was I was really struck by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs, because this was Moscow, you know, I got this image about what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first about what I would see there, you know, as a big nuclear superpower, and since I got there, it was just as like as if a huge weight that I'd been carrying around for years and my teenagers just disappeared, because it's just ordinary people, the Nord replays, not doing great. This is the period of what they call deficit neuvremia, the period of deficits, but there's no food in the shops. There was very little in terms of commodities because the supply and demand parts of the

Starting point is 00:28:40 economic equation are out of whack because it's a total central planning. You'd go into a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pile of boots all in the same size and the same color. I actually looked out because once I was in this Hungarian boot shop that was right next to where my whole residence was and I was looking for new parabuts and every single pair of boots in the shop of my size. And they're all women's boots and when I'm in boots at all, you know, because there was been an oversupply of boots and that size production. But you could really kind of see here that there was something wrong. And in the north of England, everything was closed down, the shops were shutted because

Starting point is 00:29:15 there was no demand because everybody lost their jobs, there was massive employment. And 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'd 50% mail an employment in some of the towns as the steelworks closed down and the wagon works for the railways, for example,

Starting point is 00:29:46 in my area. But in Moscow, people in the theory did have money, but there was just nothing to buy. The place was falling apart, literally. I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street, balconies fall off buildings, one accident after another. And then there was this real sense, even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope with

Starting point is 00:30:05 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 programme and I already started with my degree programme in Soviet studies at Talford, 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

Starting point is 00:30:30 how to reform the country, how to put it on a different path, that 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 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

Starting point is 00:31:03 Belarus, all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union, getting together and agreeing and essentially ending it. And Gorbachev Fino, 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 rerun the 20th century a thousand times if how many times the Soviet Union will collapse. Yeah, I wonder about that too. And I also wonder about what would have happened if it didn't collapse and go up, but you'll have found a different direction. I mean, you know, we see a very divisive time now in American history. The United

Starting point is 00:31:41 States of America is very different cultures, very different beliefs, ideologies within those states, but those are, that's kind of the strength of America's, 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

Starting point is 00:32:02 going off in their own direction. In which states? Well, you know, these kinds of conceptions that we have now are 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 some way like the United States or, you know, many other countries as well because there wasn't that ethnic dimension. But in fact, many of the way that people talk about politics has given it that kind of appearance in many respects.

Starting point is 00:32:30 Because look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union and the Soviet period, and from where you're from, in originally in Ukraine, that language is not the main signifier of identity. And that identity can take all kinds of other forms. That's really interesting. But there has to be a deep grievance of some kind. If you took a poll in any other states in that state,

Starting point is 00:32:53 I think a very small minority people would want to actually succeed even in Texas, where I spend a lot of my time. I just 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 is 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've spent a lot of time

Starting point is 00:33:30 since I've been in my book in last October, and this last year going around, I find the same feeling. But when I traveled around the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, I didn't get any kind of sense of 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 Vladisav Zulbuk, who is a professor at London School of Economics and LSE. And Zulbuk is pretty much my age and he's from the former Soviet Union's Russian. And I mean, he describes it very quickly about how it was kind of the elites,

Starting point is 00:34:08 you know, that it basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart. And there is a risk of that, you know, he as well, when you get parties and politics and people forgetting, you know, there are Americans and they are all in this together, like the lot of the population thing. But they think that their own, you know, narrow parties, unirritable ideological precepts can't for more. And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also a power play in a way that actually can't quite play out in the United States because it was the equivalent of governors in many

Starting point is 00:34:35 respects who got together three of them. In the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who then got rid of the central figure of Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be a little difficult to do that. The dynamic is not the same, but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up in the late 1980s and the early 90s. I spent a lot of time in, as well as in Ukraine and Cox's Central Asia and other places, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But you kind of see the same elite divisions here in the United States pulling in different directions and straining the overall body politic. And the way that national politics gets imposed on local politics.

Starting point is 00:35:27 In words that it certainly wasn't when I first came to the US in 1989. I didn't honestly in 1989 when I first came here. I didn't know anybody's political affiliation. I really knew that I was a religious affiliation. And obviously race was a major phenomenon here that was a shock to me when I first came. But many of the kind of the class regional geographic, you know, kind of political dimensions that I've seen in other places, I didn't see them at

Starting point is 00:35:51 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 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, I mean, it's been very careful about not putting any kind of ideological lens on anything, you know, that I'm analysing 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

Starting point is 00:36:53 either. To be honest, 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, and some respects, easier to navigate. The parameters of political parties, because you have quite clear platforms, there's also a longer history in many respects, obviously. I mean, there's a long history here in the United States as a development of the parties, going back to the late 18th century. But in the United Kingdom, for example, in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties, it was quite easy to get a handle on. At one point, in the UK, for example,

Starting point is 00:37:31 the parties were real genuine mass parties, with people who were properly members and took part in regular meetings and paid Jews, and it was easy to see what they stood for. And the same in Europe, when you look at France and Germany and Western Germany, of course, Italy and elsewhere. Here in the United States, it's pretty amorphous. The fact that you could register, randomly, it seems to be a Democrat Republican, like Trump did. At one point, he's a Democrat, next thing he's a Republican.

Starting point is 00:37:58 And then you kind of use surp, a party apparatus, but you don't have to be, you're not vetted in any way. You're not kind of, you know, but don't check you out to see if you have ideological coherence. You know, you can 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 a menu respects parties in the United States and much more loose movements.

Starting point is 00:38:24 And I think you can, you know, it's almost like a kind of an alacabre menu of different things and that people can pick a pot pick out. And it's more over time, as I've noticed, become more like a kind of an affiliation even with the sporting team. I mean, I get very shocked by the way that people say, well, I couldn't do this because, you know, that's my side and I couldn't do anything and I couldn't support someone for the other side. I mean, I have a relative in my extended family here who is a, you know, died in the wall Republican and on, you know, family holiday was a book on their table. So, there are a hundred reasons for voting for a Democrat. And I said, hey, are you thinking of shifting party affiliation? Then I opened the book and it's blank. It was pretty funny. I'd laugh. I thought, well, there you go. There's just, there's no way that people can pull

Starting point is 00:39:12 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 party's own affiliation. I think I tweeted about this maybe not eloquently. In the statement, if I remember correctly, with 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 a tribe.

Starting point is 00:39:53 I mean, it was more eloquent than that, but it was basically, this is a really good test to see. Are you actually thinking about how to solve versus like your dread 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, probably, oh, that's a good idea. I'm glad he said that. Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions, which he often did actually, I mean, obviously put them in a way that most of us wouldn't have done, but there was often kind of questions about, why is this happening?

Starting point is 00:40:29 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, but maybe it's the real estate developer in him that's taking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of 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

Starting point is 00:40:58 like this? Now, we didn't often have answers about what he was going to do in response, but those questions still had to be asked, and we shouldn't be just rejecting them out of turn. And, you know, the another strength, the thing that people often, that criticized 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

Starting point is 00:41:40 and there's a meeting and you discuss how to move stuff forward. And you don't want to be the asshole in the room that says, why are we doing this way? This could be unethical, this is hurting the world, this is totally a dumb idea. I mean, I could give specific examples that I have on my mind currently, that are technical. But the point is oftentimes the

Starting point is 00:42:06 person that's needed in that room is an asshole. That's why Steve Jobs works. So Elon Musk works. You have to roll in. That's what first principles thinking looks like. The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name calling, you know, kind of inciting violence against the people who disagree with it.

Starting point is 00:42:20 So that was kind of a problem because I mean, often, one, 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're 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, the Soviet Union since the 70s and 80s. And Trump kept pushing this out idea about, so why are we spending so much money on NATO and NATO defence, and we're all talking about this, if you all then basically paying billions to Russia for gas, isn't this contradictory?

Starting point is 00:43:04 And of course it was. But it was the way that he did it. And I actually, one instance had a discussion with a European defense minister, who basically said to me, he's saying exactly the same things as people said before him, including former defense secretary Gates. It's just the way he says it. So they took a fence, and then as a result of that, they wouldn't take action because they took a fence at what he said. So it was a kind of then a way of, could you find some other means of massaging this communication to go on a make it effective, which we would always try to focus on? Because it's kind of the delivery. But the actual message was often spot on in those kinds of issues.

Starting point is 00:43:47 I mean, he was actually highlighting these ridiculous discrepancies between what people said and what they actually did. It's the delivery, the charisma in the room, too. I'm also understanding the power of that of a leader. It's not just about what you do at a podium but in a room with advisors how you talk about stuff how you convince other leaders yeah you don't do it through gratuitous insults and incitement divides that's one of the things you just don't get anywhere on that front well it's possible tough measures and maximum pressure often there does work right there were often times where that relentless

Starting point is 00:44:28 nagging about something, constantly raising it, actually did have results where it hadn't previously. So the maximum pressure, if it kept on it in the right way and often when we were coming in behind on pushing on issues related to NATO or 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 of your testimony in that impeachment?

Starting point is 00:45:07 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. The Trumpet was personal game, he was basically trying to get the Vladimir Zilyinsky to do him a personal favour 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 on domestic politics,

Starting point is 00:45:45 is that's what it looked like. And I think that he knows the result of that. Putin took the idea or word that he could do whatever he wanted. We were constantly being asked even prior to this by people around Putin, like Nikolai Patrachev, the head of the National Security Council equivalent in Russia, we met with frequently, what's Ukraine to you? We don't get it.

Starting point is 00:46:11 Why do you even care? So they thought that we weren't serious. They thought that we weren't serious about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence or it is a national security player. And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate the political space in the United States. It's not she could, because what he was doing was seeding all this dissent and fueling already in a debate inside of US politics, the kinds of things that we see just coming out now. This kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden, that Ukraine was basically

Starting point is 00:46:45 just trying to extract things from the United States. The 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 a combination of people around him trying to find excuses to what had 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 world 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 right together here and separating out what was going on in domestic politics from what was happening in our

Starting point is 00:47:30 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. Yes. overseas around Ukraine to the wall that we now have. The confronting, signaling the value we place in peace and stability in that part of the world, or the reverse by saying we don't care. Yeah, we seem to not care. It was just to get. But I mean, the US role in that war is very complicated one. That's one one that's one of the variables. that's one that's one of the variables. Just on that testimony, did it in part break your heart that you had to testify essentially against the president of the United States? Or is that not how you

Starting point is 00:48:17 saw it? I don't think I would describe it in that way. I think what I was was deeply disappointed by what I saw happening in the American political space. I didn't expect it. Look, I was a starry-eyed immigrant. I came to the United States with all of these expectations of what the place would be. I'd already been disabused of some of the, let's just say, rosy perspectives on how the United States, I'd been shocked by the depths of racial,

Starting point is 00:48:56 I've had problems, it doesn't even sum up the problems we have in the United States. I couldn't get my head around it when I first came. I mean, I'd read about slavery in American history, but I hadn't fully fathomed. And I'll read either the way that it was ripping apart the United States.

Starting point is 00:49:10 And I'd read Alex's talk fill and he'd commented on this. And it obviously kind of changed to the way that one would have expect all this time from the 18th century onwards. So that was kind of one thing that I realized, civil rights movement and all of these acts of expansion of suffrage and everything else were imperfect at best. And I was born in 65 the same time as the civil rights act.

Starting point is 00:49:33 It was heck of a long way to go. So I wasn't, let's just say, you know, as Starry I'd about everything has had been before, but I really saw an incredible competence and professionalism in the US government. It was going to, and the election system and the integrity of it. And I really saw that, so that the United States was the gold standard for a kind of some of its institutions. And I worked in the National Intelligence Council, and I'd seen the way that the United States had tried to address the problems that it had faced in its whole botched analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of, I don't see a crime

Starting point is 00:50:10 in my view, of invading Iraq, but the way that people were trying to deal with that in the aftermath, and 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 work 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 really describe anything with, it's totally crazy looking glass, thinking of, you know, Alison Wunderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass

Starting point is 00:50:49 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 an administration, but I did not expect it to be that bad, 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 upper-most in people's minds. And it was, among a lot of the people that I worked with, but what I found, if you want to use that term of heart breaking, was the way in which all of these principles that I had really bought into and tried

Starting point is 00:51:28 to uphold in the United States government and in the things that we were trying to do with me and my colleagues was just being thrown out the window. And I would have to step up and defensive them and defensive my colleagues who were being lambasted and criticised and given death threats for actually starting up and doing their own jobs. In particular on the topic of Ukraine? Not just on Ukraine, but on national security overall. So I mean, I'd gone through this whole period even before we got to that point. I'm seeing non-partisan government officials being attacked from all sides, left and right

Starting point is 00:52:01 and but especially the right, and being basically accused of being parties and hacks in a deep state, coup plotters, you know, you name it. There, petrises and being questioned as well. And a lot of people I work with in government like myself, naturalized Americans, like the memorandum migrants, many were refugees, and many people had fought and was on behalf of the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan been blown up and put their lives on the line. They put their family lives on the line because they believed in America.

Starting point is 00:52:33 And there were reflections of Americans from all kinds of walks of life. Is what really made that cliche of America great? It wasn't whatever it was that was being banded around in these, crass political terms. It was just the strength of an incredible set of people who've come together from all kinds of places and decided that they're going to make a go of it and that they're going to, you know, try to work towards the whole bit of a variety of the preamble of the constitution towards a more perfect union. And I, you know, I saw people doing that every single day, despite all of the things that they could criticize about the United States, they'll believe in what they were doing and believe in the promise of the country, which is what I felt like. And

Starting point is 00:53:10 then here we were, people were just treating it like a game. And they were treating people like dirt. And they were just playing games with people's lives. And we all had death threats. People's, you know, whole careers, which were not just careers for their own self-aggrand asthma, but the careers of public service trying to give something back were being shattered. And I've found, you know, I just thought to myself, I'm not going to let that happen because, you know, I've come from a, what are they going to send me back to Bishop Auckland in County, don't find, I'm totally fine to go back, you know, because I could do something back there, but I'm not going to let this happen. I've made this choice to come to America. I'm all in. And these guys I'm not going to let this happen. I've made this choice to come to America. I'm all in and

Starting point is 00:53:46 These guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots and the ruining us, you know the ruining it for everybody So the personal attacks on competent hard-working passionate people who have Loved what they do in their heart similar stuff. I've seen for Viralogist and biologist so, basically scientists in the time of COVID, when there's a bunch of cynicism, and there was just personal attacks,

Starting point is 00:54:11 including death threats on people that work on viruses, work on vaccines. Yeah, aren't they going around in, but basically with protective gear on, and care somebody shoots them in the street, that's just absurd. But let me zoom out from the individual people. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:29 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 treatment of individual people, but by the results. Right. Yeah. I think that's fair. 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 of extremely competent, smart, hard-working, well-intentioned people, how do we, as a system, make mistakes in foreign policy? So the big mistake you can characterize in different ways, but in George W. Bush is invading Iraq, or maybe how it was invaded, or maybe how the decision process was made to invade it

Starting point is 00:55:28 again if gas stand with 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 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 brief thing to do at that time. And nevertheless, I mean, I don't know the numbers, but I think he was the president for eight years over increased drone attacks, increased 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.

Starting point is 00:56:29 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 you know, if you do sort of the steel man, the chaos, to make the case for chaos, maybe we need to shake up the machine, throw a wrench into the engine, into the gears. And then every individual gear is going to be very upset with that, because it's a wrench. It's not, it's not, it's an inefficient process, but maybe it leads for government. It forces the, it's not, it's an inefficient process, but maybe it leads

Starting point is 00:57:10 for government. It forces the, the system is a whole not the individuals, but the system to reconsider how things are done. So obviously, all of those things, the actual results are not that impressive. You could have done that on the latter, you know, shaking things up because I'm all one for questioning and trying to shake things up as well and do things differently. But the question is if you bring the whole system down with nothing, ideas of putting it to place, like many people, I've studied the Bolshevik revolution and many others as well. And what's the pattern here that actually fits into what you're talking about here is a kind of rigidity of thought on the part of revolutionaries in many cases as well.

Starting point is 00:57:44 And also narcissism. In fact, I think that it takes a pretty strong sense of yourself, kind of an only yourself, to want to be president of the United States. For example, we see that in many of our presidents have been narcissists to different kind of degrees. You think about Lenin, for example, and people can go back and read about Lenin.

Starting point is 00:58:03 He formed his views on his back 18, and he never shook them off. He never evolved. He didn't have any kind of diversity of thought. And on when systems go awry, it's when they don't bring in different perspectives. And so Trump, if you brought in different perspectives, you'll actually listen to them,

Starting point is 00:58:20 and not just believe that he himself knew better than anyone else, and then try to divide everybody against each other, would have been a different matter. It's a tragedy of a completely and utterly lost set of opportunities because of the flaws in his own nature. Because I mean again, there was cult 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 and creating so much factualism in American politics.

Starting point is 00:58:45 People have forgotten their Americans. They think that they're red or blue parts of teams. And if you go back over history, that's a kind of a recipe for war and internal conflict. You go back to the Byzantine Empire, for example, this is a famous episode of the Nicarayits in Constantinople, where the whole city gets trashed because the greens, the reds, the blues

Starting point is 00:59:08 and these various sporting teams in the hippodrome get whipped up by political forces and the polar place apart. And that's where we've been heading on some of these trajectories. But the other point is when you look back, a bush and a bama as well, there's a very narrow circle of decision making. A bush period is the focus on the executive branch,

Starting point is 00:59:28 with Dick Cherny as the vice president being very fixated on it. In Obama, he and the bright young things around him, from he himself is intellectually, one might say arrogant in many respects. He's a very smart guy and, you know, he's convinced that he has any, he ruminates over all things, but he's the person who makes, you know, a lot of decisions.

Starting point is 00:59:53 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. It's just me and whatever it is that I walk in up to day and I've decided to do. So I think the problem with all of our systems is why we don't get results, because we don't draw upon

Starting point is 01:00:14 the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of people out there. You do that in science. I mean, all my friends and relatives are in science. They've got these incredible collaborations with people across the world. I mean, how did we and relatives are in science. They've got these incredible collaborations with people across the world. I mean, how did we get to these vaccines for the COVID-19? Because of this incredible years of collaboration

Starting point is 01:00:32 and of sharing results and sharing and ideas. And our whole system has become ossified. We think about the congressional system, for example, as well. And this kind of rapid turn-over that you have in Congress every two years, there's no incentive for example, as well. And this kind of rapid turnover that you have in Congress every two years, there's no incentive for people basically to work with others. They're constantly campaigning. They're constantly trying to appeal to whatever

Starting point is 01:00:53 their base is, and they don't really care about some do over their constituents, but a lot of people don't. And the Senate is 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 for the good of the country to push things along. And also our government also is siloed.

Starting point is 01:01:16 There's not a lot of mechanisms for bringing people together. There ought to be in things like the National Security Council, the National Intelligence Council actually did that quite successfully at times for analysis that I saw. But we don't have, you know, we have it within the National Institutes of Health, but we saw the CDC break down on this, you know, kind of front. We don't have sufficient of those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds. You know, one of the other problems that we've have with government, with the federal government over, you know, state and local government, is actually quite small. People think that the federal government's huge because we have a post-al-service and

Starting point is 01:01:52 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 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 at yourself, another, 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,

Starting point is 01:02:32 a lot of the people that I work with in the national security side are now at all kinds of, you know, high-end political consultancies, or they're going to Silicon Valley and they've they've gone to this place and that place because after a time as a younger person or they're going 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, 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 the last few years have really done a lot of damage. We need to revitalize our government system

Starting point is 01:03:13 to get better results. We need to bring more people in even if it's for period of time, not just through expensive contracts for the big consulting companies and other entities that do government work out there, but getting people in for a period of time, expanding some of these management fellowships and the White House fellows and bringing in scientists

Starting point is 01:03:36 from the outside, giving that kind of opportunity for collaboration that we see in other spheres. I think that's actually one of the biggest roles for President that, for some reason during the election, that's never talked about is how good are you at hiring and creating a culture of attracting the right. I mean, basically chief hire, when you think of a CEO, like the great CEOs are, I mean, maybe people don't talk about it that often, but they do more often for CEOs than they do for presidents is like, how good are you building a team? Well, we make it really difficult because of the political process.

Starting point is 01:04:18 I mean, and also because we have so many political appointments, we ought to have less to be honest. I mean, we look at other governments around the world, you know, that are smaller. It's much easier for them to hire people in. You know, some of the most successful governments are much smaller. And it's not that I say that the, you know, the government is necessary too big, but it's just thinking about each unit in a different way. We shouldn't be having so many political appointments. We should kind of find more professional appointments, more non-partisan appointments, because you know, every single administration that we've had over the last, let's see, span of presidencies, they have jobs that are unfulfilled, because they can't get their candidates through Congress and the Senate, because of all the kind of political games that are being played.

Starting point is 01:05:00 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 political preference they particularly have. So I think we have to try to look at the whole system of governments in the way that we would over 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,

Starting point is 01:05:30 and you wouldn't operate it like that if you were looking at any kind of rational way. It shouldn't be so ideologically or parties untended. So you're at every level anyway. So I would actually just say make a bit for a more non-partisan approach to a lot of the parts of government. You can still kind of bring in the political imprimature.

Starting point is 01:05:49 But also you have to explain to people, writ large in America as well, that this is your government. And that actually you could also be part of this, things like the small business administration, the SD department of agriculture, all these kind of things that actually people interact with, but they don't even know it, the personal 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 the National Park Service, you know, for example, it's just when you talk about government in an abstract way, like, we're 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,

Starting point is 01:06:25 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 have gone into public service, I think they would. Yeah, they need to be. You have a lot more support for it. More like superstars, like individuals there, like big on social media, big in the public eye, and having fun with it and showing cool stuff that it's not, right now a lot of people see government as basically partisan warfare, and then it just, it makes it unpleasant to do the job,

Starting point is 01:06:57 it makes it uninspiring for people looking in from outside, about what's going on, say 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-particip. Like it's 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, by the way, because I mean, I don't think anybody should be there.

Starting point is 01:07:40 So your first advice is to fire yourself after... Well, you should definitely have terminaments, just like you shouldn't ever think right? I mean, it's just like 10 year in university. Well, we all have terminaments. Yeah, you kind of, you know, we do, we have natural terminaments, 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 not on 57 now, and I was trying to work with, you know, people from different generations for me just like You know, I've really benefited from these you know kind of

Starting point is 01:08:10 Mentorships of people all day you can you know mentor up and well and mentor down I mean, I would you know try to get you know people from different backgrounds and different generations to work together in teams Obviously, I'd like to more team network to kind of approach the things look the kind of things that you get again in science Right, I mean all these ideas are going to come from all kinds of different perspectives or team network to kind of approach the things, the kind of things that you get again in science, right? I mean, all these ideas are gonna come from all kinds of different perspectives. Age and experience does come for something, but you know, fresh ideas and coming in

Starting point is 01:08:33 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 don't agree with you. You need people to take you on and say, absolutely, that's crap. Where did you come up with that from? And they go, hang on, well, explain to me why you think so. And then you have this kind of iterative process back and forth. I mean, I would always encourage

Starting point is 01:08:58 my colleagues to tell me when they thought I was wrong. I mean, sometimes I didn't agree because I didn't see the reasoning, but at the time I was like, you know, they're right. That was a complete mistake. I need to admit that, and we need to figure out a different way of doing things. But the one point I do want to get across is there were a lot of people who were non-partisan that I worked with. I mean, honestly, in most of the jobs that I had up until more recently, I had no idea

Starting point is 01:09:22 about people's political affiliation. It's just when you get into this kind of highly charged parties and environment, they kind of force people to make decisions. And when you have one political party, political factions trying to use Serp power, it does make it quite difficult. I mean, that's the situation that we're in right now. When we're seeing some of the things happening at the United States, I've seen and studied in other settings or seen for myself happening. When you have a president who wants to cling onto power,

Starting point is 01:09:50 you've got to call that out. Is that a partisan act or is that a kind of defense of that larger political system that you're part of? So I think we've got to recognize that even if you're not partisan, you can be politically engaged. And sometimes you just have to stand up there and speak out, which is what I did, what others did as well. None of those people who spoke out can initially saw that as a partisan act, even if some of

Starting point is 01:10:19 them, since then, have decided to make political choices they hadn't made before, because in the situation, actually force people into taking sides very hard to still stay above the fray when you've got, you know, someone who's trying to perpetrate a coup. Yeah, just the 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 everybody will criticize you

Starting point is 01:10:56 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 non-partisan road after the criticism, that's the hard road. So not let the criticisms break you into a certain kind of ideological set of positions. I mean, our political system needs revitalization.

Starting point is 01:11:19 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 wave of population, and like me, you were unaffiliated. Maybe some lean in one direction over another, and unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views about things and political opinions, and you make some quite extreme on some of those

Starting point is 01:11:38 by the, from a left or right perspective. What people are looking for is kind of an articulation, things in a kind of a clear way that they can get a handle on. And they're also looking for a representation. Somebody's going to be there, you know, for you, you know, not part of a kind of rigid team that you're excluded from, you know, the ins and the outs. But what people are looking at now, they're looking at that in the workplace because they're not finding that.

Starting point is 01:12:01 In politics, you're actually getting workers pushing the people talk about the rise of the work, but people just saying, hang on a sec, 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. That's a peculiarity of the United States system. The Britain, you've got the National Health Service, and you've got all the national-wide benefits. You're not tethered to your employer like you are in the United States. But here now, we're asking people, people are pushing for more representation.

Starting point is 01:12:31 They're asking to be represented within their workplace, be it Starbucks where Brice Desert, Starbucks employees are trying to unionize. We have unions among our research assistants, the bookings institution where I am, kind of teaching assistants and big universities 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

Starting point is 01:12:54 they work for to make that change, because they don't see it happening in the political sphere. So it's not just enough to go out there and protest in the street, but if you want something to happen, that's why you're seeing big corporations playing a bigger role as well Yeah, and of course there's you know this a longer discussion is also criticisms of that mechanisms of unions to achieve The giving of a voice to people this goes back to my own experience growing up in northern England The Durham miners that I was part of, the generations, first person in my family, not in the mines on my dud side, they created their own association.

Starting point is 01:13:33 It wasn't a union person at the very beginning. But 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 opened in the same time as World War I, and where they all got together,

Starting point is 01:13:50 because they didn't have the vote, they didn't have suffrage at the time, because they didn't have any money, so they didn't compare the tax and they couldn't run for parliament. And this is the origins of the organised Labour 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

Starting point is 01:14:24 Union, even when they were still having ties with players like the minds of Don Bass in the 1920s, Trotsky ites and Leninists and Compinus. They were more focused on how to improve their own well-being, what they call the welfare. They had some welfare societies where they were trying to think, and that's what British and Starbucks want, or workers in Amazon. They're looking about their own well-being. 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 connection to politics at the moment, because you're being told by a representative,

Starting point is 01:15:00 sorry, I don't represent you, because you didn't feel for me. If you're not a Democrat, you're not a Republican, you're not a Republican, you're not red, you're not blue, you're not mine. And so people say, well, I'm in this work process. This is kind of my collective. This is, therefore, this is why I'm going to have to try to push to make change. So, I mean, this is kind of happening here.

Starting point is 01:15:18 And we have to realize that we've kind of gone and we're full circle back to that kind of period of the early emergence of sort of mass labor and, you know, that's where the political parties that we know today and, you know, the kind of early unions came out of as well. This sort of feeling of a mass society, but where people weren't really able to get together and implement or push for change. You know, with unions at a small scale and a local scale, it's like every good idea on a small scale can become a bad idea in a large scale. So like a marriage is a beautiful thing,

Starting point is 01:15:56 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 and just becomes a caricature of a thing or like Christmas and the holidays. It's like I don't disagree but what I'm saying is there's people are basically looking for something here and you know kind of this is why I mean I myself am start to think about much more local you know kind of solutions for all of these you. This is again the team to network to approach. On the impeachment, looking back, because you're part of it, you get the experience that do you think they strengthen their weakened this nation? I think a weakened in many respects, just the way that it was conducted.

Starting point is 01:16:42 I mean, there's a new book coming out by a couple of journalists in the Washington Post, I haven't actually seen it yet, but I really did, you know, kind of worry that myself, that it became a spectacle. And although it actually, I think, in many respects, was important in terms of an exercise of civic responsibility and, you know, give 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 progatives. I was as well, I was like you know, I'm running off myself and trying to learn an enormous amount about it because I was in the middle of it all of this, that it didn't ultimately show responsibility and accountability. ultimately show responsibility and accountability. And that in itself was kind of, was weakened because on,

Starting point is 01:17:28 you know, both sides, there was a lot of parties on 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 prognos. You could have, you know, kind of, they should have been embracing, you know, Congress's progatives. You could have, you know, kind of basically done this in a, in something of a different way. But the whole thing is because it was this larger atmosphere

Starting point is 01:17:56 of polarized, I don't even polarized, but fractured, fractured politics. And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say, in many of the members of Congress on the Republican side, 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 not kind of addressing head-on, the fact that they'd been pushing Trump to be impeached and talking about being an illegitimate president right from the very beginning. As it result, a lot of people just saw this

Starting point is 01:18:27 as kind of a continuation of political games coming out of the 2016 election. But on the Republican side, it was just a game. There was people I knew who were basically one point, one of them winked at me. In the middle of this impeachment, it's just like, don't take this personally.

Starting point is 01:18:46 This is a game. This isn't a game. That's why I think that it weakened because, again, on the outside, the whole process weakened as in the eyes of the world because, again, the United States was the gold standard. I do think, again, in the terms of the larger population, although a lot of people did actually see the system standing up trying to do something to help people account, but there's still 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,

Starting point is 01:19:26 but there's a different way you talk about issues or concerns about accountability when you care about your country, when you love your country, when you love the ideals, and when you versus when you just want to win. And stick it to the other side. No, not on the other side. No, I agree. I mean, there were people who I actually thought

Starting point is 01:19:48 managed that, that made it about the country rather than about themselves. But I guess there's no attempt 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

Starting point is 01:20:03 tends to be personal. You know, people, whether people decide to do it or not. It's not institutional, if that makes sense. sensitive structures that the kind of sense of accountability and responsibility tends to be personal. You know, people, whether people decided 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 a note 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 a note of citizenship. There's, you know, presumably you did too, you, too. You kind of suddenly become an American citizen. It's not something you take on

Starting point is 01:20:28 likely. And so I felt this deep sense of responsibility all the time, which is why I went into the administration the first place. I mean, I got a lot of flak for it because I thought, well, look, I've been asked. And there's a real issue here after the Russian interference and the old influence operation in the 2016 elections and I knew what was going on and I should do something. If not me then you know okay someone else will go and do but can I live with myself just sitting on the sidelines and criticising what people are doing you know and kind of worrying about this or am I actually gonna muck in there and you and just go and do something.

Starting point is 01:21:05 It's like seeing a house on fire and you say that, this is pretty awful and dangerous, but I could go in there and do something. To clarify the house on fire, meaning the cyber war that's going on, or cyber attacks, or cyber security. Well, in the 2016, 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

Starting point is 01:21:44 previous stints in the government to push back against this and try to make sure it didn't happen again. And look, I also didn't have this mad, kind of crazy ideological view of Russia, either. I mean, I knew the place. I knew the people had been sitting at 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 something I've spent a long time trying to understand for myself going back to that very beginning of why

Starting point is 01:22:07 the Russians trying to blows up. There must be an explanation. There was. It was a very 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.

Starting point is 01:22:22 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 did 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 we were complaining about the Russian intervention. He said,

Starting point is 01:22:52 are you telling me that the United States is a banana republic that is so vulnerable to these kinds of efforts? He actually genuinely mystified, although obviously it was probably part of a political stick 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,

Starting point is 01:23:21 that vulnerability was as stark as it, you know, ever could be. Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem as a thing, as they were the kindling to all of the kind of the fires. Putin didn't start any of this, other kind of problems, domestically, just took advantage of them. And, you know, basically added a bit of an excelement here and there. Yeah, the interference, I mean, that's a much longer discussion. Because it's also for me, technically fascinating. I've been playing with idea of just launching

Starting point is 01:23:54 like a million bots, but they're doing just positive stuff and just being kind. Yeah, I was kind of wondering if is it possible to do something on this skill that's positive? Because you know, a lot of people seem to be able to use all of this for pretty negative effect. You've got to kind of hope that you could do this, use the same networks for positive 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.

Starting point is 01:24:30 So do the, because if there's something broken about the system, you want to break through all the rules and do something that you know in your heart is the right thing to do. I mean, that's what Karen Schwartz did with releasing journals and publications that were behind paywalls to the public and the rest of the foreign they committed. But to me, it's fascinating because I, 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 there was more use for political bickering than to actually understand the national security problem.

Starting point is 01:25:14 Because I would like to know the actual numbers involved in the influence. I would like to, I mean, obviously, hopefully, people now understand that better than are trying to defend the national security of this country. But it felt like, for example, if I launch one bot and then just contact somebody at the New York Times saying I launched this one bot, they'll just say MIT, scientists, hacks, you know, they'll just, and then that, you know, they'll spread. But that's exactly what happened. It was, you know, kind of, I think that, you know, Putin

Starting point is 01:25:51 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 pop performance artist. I mean, Trump understood exactly the same thing that 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. A lot of people working around him.

Starting point is 01:26:25 I remember that was the old Bolshevik. I did prop and the whole Soviet propaganda machine. Putin growing up in that environment and having the Kremlin press office and older people around him got a massive machine, knew how to do that work. They haven't done what the Chinese did in Russia, blocking everything and having a big firewall, putting out lots of content, getting into 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'd call up New York Times, and people are going to 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

Starting point is 01:27:06 of the Democrats and everything. I'm going to keep trying to push against this. No, they did not elect Donald Trump. Americans elected Donald Trump. And the electoral college was a key part. Vladimir Putin didn't make that up. And basically, I also remember one point, the Russian ambassador, talking to me about when we were doing the standard, you know, here we are, we're lodging our complaint about the interference, you know, he didn't, he basically said, well, we didn't, you know, kind of invent Komi, and, you know, basically the, you know, the decision to reopen, you know, Hillary Clinton's emails, or, you knowiener and his emails on his computer.

Starting point is 01:27:49 And I was like, yeah, he's right. I mean, there were plenty of things in our own system that created chaos and tipped the election, not kind of what the Russians did, but it's obviously easier to blame the Russians and blame yourself when things are kind of all those random forces and those random factors. Because people couldn't understand what had happened in 2016. There was no hanging chads like 2000, where there was a kind of a technical problem that actually ended up with the intervention of the Supreme Court. There was pure and simple, the electoral college at work and a candidate that nobody expected, including the Republicans and the primaries, to end up getting elected

Starting point is 01:28:32 or put forward at different 2016, suddenly becoming the president. And they needed a meta-explanation. It was much better to say Vladimir Putin had done it, Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin guys were like, oh my god, yeah, fantastic. Champagne cocks popping, this is great, our chaos agent, they knew they hadn't done it, but they'd love to take credit for it. And so, they're 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 crumbling, grumbling in the system.

Starting point is 01:29:06 And he's basically was taking advantage of that forever. And I wanted to basically try to work with us to cut through that. And the thing is then people lost faith in the integrity of the election system. Because people were after suggesting that the Russians had actually distought the election's people books about that.

Starting point is 01:29:21 They said that the system, they were trying to hack our minds. But again, we were the fertile soul for this. I mean, we know this from Russian history, the role of the Bolsheviks, you know, the whole 1920s and 1930s with Stalin, the fellow travelers, and the, you know, socialist, you know, international. I mean, the Russians and the Soviets have been at this fears of about kind of pulling people along and into kind of a broader frame, but it didn't mean that they were influencing directly the politics of countries, you know, writ large, the plenty of interventions. It's just that we were somehow, it was a confluence of events, a perfect storm, we were somehow

Starting point is 01:30:03 exquisitely vulnerable because of things that we had done to ourselves. It was what Americans were doing to themselves that was the issue. You think that's the bigger threat than large-scale bot armies? Those can be, if right, 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 and looking for information. I'm not on social media I'm in social media, but not by myself. You know, I don't put myself out there I'm not I've got a Twitter feed. I have a Twitter one. Yeah, but there is a There's a few health cast and I have all kinds of strange things

Starting point is 01:30:41 It's a few health cards, which I kind of kind of like, actually have people send things to me. You have so many fans, it's hilarious. But what I try to do is just be really critical. I mean, my mom sends me stuff, and I'm like, what is this? Yeah, I got it. Yeah. It's just, you know, your own mother can be as much of an agent of misinformation as, you know,

Starting point is 01:30:59 kind of Vladimir Putin. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're all, you know, kind of, we all have to really think about what it is we're reading. There's one thing from my childhood that was really important. I mean, I always think every kid in school should have this. My next door neighbor, who was, it was actually very active in the, in the Labour party. And he was, you know, kind of really interested in the way that opinion, you know, shaped people's political views. And he was well, she was a native Welsh speaker.

Starting point is 01:31:26 So he was always trying to explore English and how there was kind of the reach of the English culture and how it was kind of shaping the way that people thought. And he used to read every single newspaper from all the different spectrums, which was quite easy to do back in the 70s and 80s because there weren't that many in the UK context. And every Sunday, he would get all the different Sunday papers

Starting point is 01:31:46 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 it means my godfather, and he was just an incredible guy. And he was just super interesting and, you know, kind of culturally, you know, and outside are always kind of looking in.

Starting point is 01:32:02 And he basically runs through, you know, what the Guardian looked at, the observer, the daily male, the son, you know, kind of all of these, you know, the telegraph, all of these newspapers, and how you could tell, you know, their different vantage points. And of course, it's complicated to do that now. I mean, in this, you know, incredibly extensive media space, I look at what it is that they're saying. And then I tried to, you know, read around it, and then, you. I look at what it is that they're saying. And then I tried to you know, read around it. And then, you know, look at what are 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

Starting point is 01:32:33 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. I should be. Not getting lost in the sort of the hysteria that can be created. It does seem that the American system somehow, not the political system, just humans, love drama. Very good, like the Hunter Biden laptop story. There's always like one, two, three stories, somehow that we just pick, that we're just gonna,

Starting point is 01:33:08 this is the stuff we're gonna fight about for this election. And everyone's got an opinion on it. Everybody, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's the most, like Hillary Clinton's emails, Russians hacked the election. Yeah, we had John Podesta's pasta recipes for a while, you know, that we were kind of

Starting point is 01:33:25 all obsessing over. I don't know, people running out and trying them out, you know, or something like that. And there's fun, I mean, there's all 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 senior officials and mothers, they should be

Starting point is 01:33:45 anywhere near any of the issues that there's ethics, there's government ethics and things that you know kind of across the ball, 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. And politicians are really good at that because it attracts from the larger question because every single member of Congress and You know government officials their family should be know where any of anything they're doing Well that I could push back in disagree on I mean Well, it depends on what they're doing making money out of it

Starting point is 01:34:16 You know and kind of basically being in business is what I mean, you know kind of this is a 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'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. 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

Starting point is 01:34:53 with people you work with. That's right. No, I have the same worries as well because in my kind of clouds, you know, I would encourage, you know, my daughter to do something completely different, not going to the same field. No,, it's different if you're in science or mathematics or something like this and maybe you've got a family member, you're building on some of their theories and ideas. If Albert Einstein had a kind of an offspring, it was in mathematics and took fathers thinking further, that would be very different. But if it's kind of you're in business and other things, and it's just, you know, it's the nepotism problem.

Starting point is 01:35:26 You know, one has that. Well, that says that too. You're in a specific idea. I'm sure they do. If they don't, 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.

Starting point is 01:35:39 Yeah, well, I'm not what I'm meaning, but I mean, it's just, but they shouldn't be sort of told, no, sorry, you can't go and study math because, you know, whatever physics, you know because of but a lot of that you can't actually make it into law Well, you could I suppose but honestly if you do that kind of thing It should be transparent. There should be just an honesty about it It gets back to what I was talking about before we need diversity of views and diversity of thinking and you can't have other things It's like being partisanal, you know

Starting point is 01:36:02 and you can't have other things. It's like being partisan or, you know, brooting just for a team. You know, if something's going to cloud ejudgment or constrain the way you think about things and become, you know, kind of a barrier to moving on our... 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, although they kind of like the people who you kind of see out there in prominent positions that the suns or daughters of, including of Putin himself. I mean, that's when a system has degenerated and that's going to 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.

Starting point is 01:36:43 So critics on the left often use the strong man of TDS, Trump to range from the syndrome. Why does Donald Trump arouse so much emotion in people? It's just the nature of the person. I mean, I don't feel particularly emotional about him. I mean, he's kind of a, he's a very flawed guy. Do you know, to be honest, and this missing mean, he's kind of a, he's a very flawed guy. Do you not, to be honest, and this missing 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.

Starting point is 01:37:27 I mean, I kept thinking to myself, my god, if this guy didn't have this entourage around him, how would he function? And I mean, I felt sorry for us as well. I mean, that he ended up being our president because that should not have happened. I mean, in terms of character and in terms of fit for the job. Although I saw this, you know, kind of over a period of time, but I didn't feel, you know, kind of any, you know, sense of derangement, you know, kind of around him. I didn't drive me nuts in that way. I just became, I was just very worried about, you know, the kind of the impact that he

Starting point is 01:37:57 was having on, on many particular issues. Here's the important thing. So what I noticed with people that criticize Donald Trump is they get caught up in the momentum of it and they're unable to see, first of all, let's start with some ground truth, which is approximately half the country voted for the guy. Right? Yeah, and more voted in 2020 than voted in 2016 for it. Yeah. And I just feel like people don't load that in

Starting point is 01:38:33 when they're honestly pretty fast. And a lot of those people didn't vote for him and his personality, and often could, because I know a lot of people have voted for him by the first time and second time. And they could disassociate all of the kind of features of Donald Trump that drives other people nuts from,

Starting point is 01:38:53 what they thought that an actual fact he could achieve in terms of, and it wasn't just this kind of sense about what I couldn't possibly vote for a Democrat. Some of us is just like, well, not key shakes things up and we need things to be shaken up. Some people might have voted for a person out. Some of them did as well, but I'm just saying that not all of them did either. We don't know that I did.

Starting point is 01:39:13 I can't say. I'm just saying anecdotally, I know people have voted for because he's him, from the charisma and another sea voted because he's shaking things up and he's keeping people on their toes and you know kind of we need that you know idea. But the way to avoid trauma through angiocentrum to me, as a doctor I'm sort of prescribing to the patients on this syndrome, this issue, is I feel like you have to empathize with the people. Well, you have to imagine your mind, all the difference, like, um, strengths that the people who have voted for Donald Trump,

Starting point is 01:39:53 C 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, I don't 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, is based on personal stuff similar like the Trump. Yeah, I know it is. I mean, that's what people do. Look, I think part of that is,

Starting point is 01:40:36 I mean, I look, first of all, I want to say, I completely agree with you about understanding where and people are coming from. I think it's very important for people to listen to other people in their views. I try to do that all the time, try to learn from that. You know, I mean, everybody's got a perspective and a context, we all live in a certain context. We're all living in history, our own personal histories, matter a lot, and also the larger context and environment in which we're living in.

Starting point is 01:40:58 And where we live, and who we live with, and the kinds of lives that we lead as well, those are all extraordinary important. I know that from myself, everything that I've done in my life has been shaped by where I came from, who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things. You can't take yourself out of that. You can do it in some, like a science or something else, but still your old views and maybe some of the ideas that you have,

Starting point is 01:41:20 and pursuing the experiment might have been shaped by your larger context, depending on what it is that you work on. But the other thing is the niche of the political system. The presidential election is like a personality contest, a beauty contest. It's like a kind of a referendum on one person or another. It's kind of like what we see in Russia, on the sea, with Putin or not Putin or Putin before.

Starting point is 01:41:44 It's all about Putin. And what do you think about Putin? It's not about what the president should be doing and what their policies are. That's kind of the bizzanas 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 hundred thousand rather people in the conservative party have just voted for three leaders in a row, the rest of the country isn't it? And they're just looking at whether they like that personality and what they say to them rather than what they're necessarily going to do for the country.

Starting point is 01:42:15 I mean, which is pretty absurd. And again, the presidency is a weird hybrid in the United States. We were talking before about it, the person should be running the country, to the chief executive or the prime minister in another setting. But we don't think of it like that. We often think about whether we like the guy or not. We'd like to hang out with them all. One of my younger relatives and I said,

Starting point is 01:42:36 so why did you vote for Trump? He said, well, he was great. Funny. I went to his rallies. I got all kind of charged up. And I said, could you see yourself voting for Biden? No, he's too old. And I simply know he's only just a little bit, you know, kind of older than Trump.

Starting point is 01:42:49 Or is, you know, the same age as your grandma, do you think your grandma's older? No, no, not at all. But it's just this kind of perception he's boring, you know? So there's people are actually sometimes, you know, basically being, you know, kind of motivated by just a feeling, you know, kind of that kind of sense, because that's the sort of nature of the, you know, the presidency. It's this kind of how you feel about yourself

Starting point is 01:43:08 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 Queen Elizabeth II and everybody, you know, seemed to for the most part, I don't know 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 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

Starting point is 01:43:44 military. It's all things, you know, kind of at once, and then the commander in chief of the military. It's all things, you know, kind of at once, but ultimately for a lot of people, it's just how we feel about that person. Oh, I couldn't cover up for them because of this, or I couldn't vote for them because of that. And in 2016, I know Hillary Clinton actually did win the election in terms of the popular vote.

Starting point is 01:44:00 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 intellectual college, in the intellectual college vote. So it wasn't just, you know, gender or something like that, but it was an awful lot of things for people found Trump attractive because he was sticking up the big middle finger to the establishment. He's an anti-establishment change character.

Starting point is 01:44:22 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, 12% of people. So they could vote for some completely totally different, radically different people because that's a sense of change and charisma. I mean, I had people who I knew voted for Trump, but it would have voted for Obama again if he'd run again. Because they just liked the way that he spoke,

Starting point is 01:44:44 they liked the way that, spoke, like the way that, you know, because they said, I mean, this is all my own anecdotal things, do it about one of my relatives that I could listen to a bummer all day, every day. I just loved the way he sounded. I loved the way he looked, you know, I looked just like the whole thing about him and then to say about Trump, while 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, a lot of people decide they couldn't have one with pilgrimage.

Starting point is 01:45:10 And, you know, maybe they could go off and have one with Brako-Bamma and with Donald Trump. They didn't want to have one with Joe Biden, you know, for example. And remember, George W. Bush didn't drink, so he wouldn't have had a beer with him. He'd have gone out and got a soda or something with him. But, you know, there's, and remember George W. Bush didn't drink, so he wouldn't have had to be with him. He'd gone out and got a soda or something with him. But you know, there's this, there's that kind of element of just that sort of personal connection in the way that the whole presidential election is set up. It's less about the parties. It's

Starting point is 01:45:38 less about the platforms. 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,

Starting point is 01:45:59 the recent Vladimir Putin and the full context of his life. Let's zoom out and look at 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 have actually said

Starting point is 01:46:26 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 Hilton. That was obviously a pretty catastrophic event, but if you look at then other parts of the ledger of what Putin was doing from the 2000s onwards, he stabilized the Russian economy, brought back confidence in the Russian economy and financial system. He built up a pretty impressive team of technocrats for everything, central bank and the economics and finance ministries, who really got the country back into shape again and solvent, paid off all of the debts,

Starting point is 01:47:12 and really started to build the country back up again domestically. And the first couple of terms, again, putting Chechnya to one side, which is a little hard, because there was a lot of atrocities. And I have to say that he was pretty involved in all of that because the FSB, which he'd headed previously, was in charge of wrapping up Chetshania, and it created a very strange system of field, to almost a feudal system in the relationship

Starting point is 01:47:40 between Putin at the top and Qadirif in Chetshania. 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 in opening up the country for business, you know,

Starting point is 01:47:57 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. There was a lot of opportunity for people. People's labour, 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 a, I guess, a sense of much more political pluralism. It wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Eltson period, and then you see a shift.

Starting point is 01:48:28 And it's pretty much when he comes back into power again, in 2011, 2012. And that's when we see a different phase emerging. And part of it is the larger international environment where Putin has himself has become kind of convinced of the United States out to get him. And part of it goes back to the decision on the part of the United States when they're Iraq in 2003. There's also the recognition of Kosovo in 2008 and the all kind of machinations around all kinds of other issues of an aid to expansion and elsewhere,

Starting point is 01:49:03 but Iraq in 2003, and this whole idea after that, that the United States is in the business of regime change, and perhaps has him and his crosshairs as well. But there's also, then, 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 the whole idea of the global financial system, and that Russia was prospering, and that Russia, you know, parked the GA to actually could be genuinely one of the major economic and financial powers. And then suddenly, he realizes that in the West is incompetent, that, you know, we totally have mismanaged the economy of our own,

Starting point is 01:49:46 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, in this kind of period. But then, you know, and I think that kind of compels him to kind of come back into the presidency

Starting point is 01:50:04 and try to kind of take things under control again, in 2007, 2012, I think that kind of compels him to kind of come back into the presidency and try to kind of take things under control again in 2007, 2012 and after that he goes into kind of a much more sort of focused role where he sees United States as a big big 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

Starting point is 01:50:31 couldn't possibly be related by Americans, as somehow was some kind of external interference because the Russians interfered and had an impact. Putin himself thinks at that time, it's one of the reasons why he interferes in our elections later, that the United States or another said interfere, because he knew that people weren't that thrilled about him coming back did kind of like the Medvedev period. And the protests and Moscow and St. Petersburg and other

Starting point is 01:50:54 major cities, he starts a believer instigated by the West, by the outside, because of funding for transparency in elections and and all of the NGOs and others, the operating state departments and the policy funding and the whole attitudes of God is back, 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,

Starting point is 01:51:21 we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine. And it's always, 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 I've written about Putin, that in that same time frame, I'm going to all these conferences in Russia, where Putin is and Peskov is press secretary, and they talk about him reading Russian history. I think is this and this kind of view 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

Starting point is 01:51:56 of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of 2017, but also the collapse of the Russian Empire before it. And he starts to be critical about lending the Bolsheviks, and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine as the same country. Ukraine and Russia is being one and the same. And this is where the ledger flips, because I mean the initial question you asked me is about, well, has Russia, 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, instability and future of Russia, but he starts to obsess about the past. And he'll start to take things in a very different direction. He starts to clamp down at home because of the rise of opposition and the fact that he knows that his

Starting point is 01:52:43 brand is not the same as it was before and, brand is not the same as it was before in his pop it. I wish he'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, just be talking 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 going to 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 in still in place, that's not going to be particularly possible. And that, you know, it's around the time

Starting point is 01:53:17 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 Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia. Because if you pay very close attention to his speech on the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014, you all of the foreshadowing of where we are now. It's already of his view of his obsessions, his historical obsessions, his view of himself has been fused with the state, of the moderns are, and his idea that the West is up to get them, and it becomes almost a messianic mission to turn things in a different direction. And who are the key people to you in this evolution of the human being of the leader? Is it Patrick Shav, is it Shorygu, the Minister of Defence?

Starting point is 01:54:17 Is it, like you mentioned, Peskov, the Pressecretary. 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 counterpart,

Starting point is 01:54:38 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 it was going too far and then ruffling the Union then as well. They were opposed to his reforms. There's always been a kind of a very strong nationalist contingent that become Russian nationalists over time rather than Soviet hardliners who

Starting point is 01:55:12 basically want to maintain the empire, the union in some form. And in the very early past of the 1990s, there was a lot of pressure put on Ukraine and all the other former Soviet republics, now independent states, by people around Mayor Lushkov, for example, in Moscow, by other forces in the Russian Duma, not just Vladimir Jirinovsky and others, but it's really serious, what we would call him, like right wing in a nationalist forces, but it's pervasive in the system. And it's especially pervasive in the KGB and in the security sector. And that's where Putin comes out of. Remember, Putin also was of the opinion that one of the biggest mistakes the Bolsheviks made was

Starting point is 01:55:55 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. The one to kind of bring back Russian orthodoxy is a state instrument and instrument of state power. And it was 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 other than power, honestly, and this sea Putin as their vehicle for power. I think people like Sergey Kirchenko, I knew Kirchenko back in the 90s.

Starting point is 01:56:31 I mean, my God, that guy's old in. I like Dmitry Medvedev, who was a warm, fuzzier version of Putin, certainly had a totally different perspective wasn't in the KGB. You say warmer fuzzier version. A lot more fuzzier version, yeah. I mean, he was literally a warm

Starting point is 01:56:45 personality. I don't know if you watched him during the September 30th annexation, the guy had all kinds of facial twitches and looks 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 Patastryka. We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia during Paris-Straker, he was in Dresden, watching the East German state fall apart. And dealing with the Stasi and in a kind of place where you weren't getting a lot of information about what was happening in West Germany or even what was happening back home in Paris-Straker. And he has that kind of group of people around him, the patrachevs and Bortnikovs and others. And so he gave on off and others,

Starting point is 01:57:25 you know, from the different configurations of his administration, who have come out of that same kind of mindset and who kind of wanting to put everything back together again. So there's a lot of enablers, a lot of power seekers, and there are a lot of people who think the same as him as well. He is a man of his times, a man of his context. You as a top advisor yourself and a scholar of Putin, do you think it actually now in his inner circle? Are there people he trusts? There are people he trusts for some things,

Starting point is 01:58:00 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 people who trust 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 some deeply compromised. I know he's, I think he compartmentalizes things. He's often said that the only person who trusts himself, and I think that's probably true. He's the kind of person who keeps his own council. I mean, people talk about coval choc, for example,

Starting point is 01:58:20 or some of the other people who are friends with him that are going to go back to his time in St. Petersburg. Various points, he seemed to spend a lot of time way back when talking to people who are people think of kind of more modulating forces like Alexei Kudrin, but it doesn't seem to be interacting with them. There are obviously aspects of his personal life, does he speak to his daughters, does he speak to kind of lovers, kind of unaware people speculated about who might be confiding, 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

Starting point is 01:59:09 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. Deeply suspicious of people and of information. And I think in a part of the problems that we see with Putin now, I mean, I've come from isolation during COVID. I'm really convinced that, you know, like many of us, a lot of Putin's views have hardened and the way that he looks at the world have

Starting point is 01:59:46 been shadowed in very dark ways by the experience of this pandemic. Obviously he was in a bubble, different kind of bubble from most of us. I mean, most of us are not bubbles with multiple kind of policies and the kind of the crumbling. But we've seen so much, it's obviously a lot of this stage, that isolation, you know, they kind of make 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's at the other end.

Starting point is 02:00:14 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 and the old days by the presidential administration, I know that, because it was a lot more open in the past and I have a lot of meetings with people in the presidential administration who brought outside, you know, it's their 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

Starting point is 02:00:44 set of information. You would meet with people. You've heard all the stories about where he had once called up Masha Guesson and had to come in, obviously a very different character as a journalist and a critic. We've heard about Benedictine from Echolmoschavi, the radio program, the editor who Putin would talk to and consult with. He'd reach out. People like Lizman Alexeva, for example, the head of Memorial, he had some respect for her and would sometimes just talk to her. For example, all of that seems to have come to a halt. I think a lot of us worry, I mean, us who watch Putin about what kind of information

Starting point is 02:01:26 is he getting? You know, is it just information, these seeking and gathering himself that fits into his world view and his framework? We're all guilty of that. They're looking for things. It gets to our social media preferences. Our people just bring into him things that they think he wants to hear, like the algorithm, you know, kind of like the Kremlin working that regard was he himself in a tapping into

Starting point is 02:01:46 Source of information that he absolutely wants and remember he is not a military guy He's an operative and he was sort of trained in operations and you know contingency planning So he's shy good defense minister as a civil engineer was the former minister of emergencies It wasn't a military planner you know somebody like was the former minister of emergencies. It wasn't a military planner. Somebody like Gerassimov, the chiefs of staff, maybe a military guy in this case from the army, but he's also somebody who's in a different part,

Starting point is 02:02:15 the chair of command, he's not somebody who would spontaneously start telling Putin things. And Putin comes out of the FSB, out of the KGB, of the Soviet era, and he knows the way that intelligence gets filtered and works. He's probably somebody who wants to consume raw intelligence. He doesn't want to hear anybody else's analysis. He's thrived in the past of picking things up from people. I've taken part in all of these meetings with him, gone fireworks because he's just collecting information. He's sussing people out. He wants to know the questions they ask.

Starting point is 02:02:47 He learns something about the questions that people ask, the way that they ask them. So he's kind of soliciting information himself. And if he's cut off from that information, because of circumstances, then 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.

Starting point is 02:03:07 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? Oh, I think it's pretty apparent. Oh, what, what would the security establishment will be the... Well, that would be the larger, thinking the funneling in information

Starting point is 02:03:26 from the presidential administration, from the National Security Council. It looks like he made that decision with a handful of people. And then 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.

Starting point is 02:03:43 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 you, watch the whole time and thinking, hang on a second, I've got to go and I've got this meeting and I've got that meeting. And yeah, your point, you're not going to wait there. So I give this long explanation, I've got to get to the point. And then I've got to then choose for myself, what's the information I'm going to impart to you? After the 20 things that I think are important, you know, okay, I've got 20 minutes, maybe I only shouldn't get two minutes, maybe you know, you get called out. And somebody, you know, kind of interrupts, something happens. I'm going to get one minute,

Starting point is 02:04:22 two minutes. I mean, I wanted to remember remember I had to give a presentation when I was in government, 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 is an academic and a former professor and you and a former professor and, you know, I'm going to watch Jim in action. He's going to like, you know, five seconds in if we're like, we're like, 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 or they wanted to convey and they're, you know, they convey and they're prepared, a nice sort of

Starting point is 02:05:05 full-some PowerPoint-like approach. We never even got there. And so God knows what, he took away from it at the end of it. And that's, think about Putin. He's going to be kind of impatient. He's, we see the televised things where he kind of sits at a table, a bit like people want to see us here. And he puts his hands on the table and he looks across at the person who says, so tell me, you know, what's the main things I need to know? And of course, the person's mind probably goes blank, you know, with the kind of the thought of like, Oh, God, what's the main thing? Are they going to start? Well, Vladimir, Vladimir, you know, they start the kind of, you know, they're revving up, we have 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?

Starting point is 02:05:48 And then how does he process it? And is he suspicious of it? Does he not believe it? And what inside of his own history then, you know, leads into 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 there was a high probability maybe,

Starting point is 02:06:09 let me guess. Oh, I think he pretty much thought it, because I think he thought that, you know, kind of resilience, he wasn't very popular. There was a lot of, you know, pro-Russian sentiment and whatever where he thinks that is, because people have Russian speakers. And, you know, they're kind of they're kind of in polling, they express

Starting point is 02:06:26 affinity with Russia. I mean, certainly in Crimea, that worked out because a majority of the population had higher sentiments of feelings of affinity with Russia. And obviously, that kind of they got traction there. But it's more complicated. We talked about Donbass before about being a kind of melting pot when they tried the same thing in Donbass, Daneska and Larkansk, because

Starting point is 02:06:49 they tried in Crimea in 2014, didn't pan out. In fact, a whole wall broke out. They tried to kind of in many of the major cities that are now under attack, including a desert, to kind of ferment pro-Russian movements and they completely not leave fellow parts. So Putin was thinking, you know, pretty sure based on polling and the FSB having infiltrated, you know, an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchy has been now seeing his quite parent with some of the dismissals in Ukraine. It was pretty sure that, you know, kind of he would get traction and that it would be like 1956 in Hungary or 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Remember, he comes out of the Andropov levee, it's called the cohort of people who come

Starting point is 02:07:34 into the KGB under Yuri and theropov, and Yuri andropov has presided over a lot of these anti-discident movements inside of Russia itself and how you suppress opposition, but also of how you deal with the uprisings in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And there's all these lessons from this that you could 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 you thought you'd, in the Sil Silensky would run away. You had a COVID-19 run away, but you know, that was kind of a bit, you know,

Starting point is 02:08:10 sort of a different set of circumstances. And they thought that all of the local governments would, you know, kind of capitulate because they had enough Russians and inverted commas in there. Again, mistaking language. And, you know, kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity or how people would react in the time and not understanding people's linkages and importance of place, the way that people feel about who they are and a certain sort of circumstance of the place.

Starting point is 02:08:39 But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is unlike anything that he was ever involved with. But I don't think he thought it would be, you know, because it's this kind of if he looks back into the past, you write though, he wasn't involved in 68 or 56 or what happened in the 1980s in Poland. But there's a very wide front and it's the capital and I mean this isn't going for this. This isn't Chichinal, this isn't you know kind of syria or for example. This is a major invasion. Or a lot.

Starting point is 02:09:10 Exactly. Like a large, it's large to the size. It was more like Afghanistan but they didn't realize that because again, Ukrainians are us. This is kind of a 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 they're psyches. If I look back to the 1990s, I remember being in seminars in the Harvard at the time, and we were doing a lot of research on what was happening in the forms of union at the time,

Starting point is 02:09:42 because the early 1990s just after the whole place fell apart. And there was already underyelts in this idea of Russians abroad, Russians in the near-abroad, Russian speakers, and they need to bring them back in. And I remember, we had seminars at the time where we talked about at some point, there would 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 on the world. I mean, look what's happened in Scotland, for example. Most people in Scotland speak English. The Scottish

Starting point is 02:10:19 language is not the standard bearer of Scottish identity. It's almost a civic identity, a different identity than not just national identity, just like you see in Ukraine. And there's lots of English people have moved to Scotland and now think of themselves as Scottish or Brazilians or Italians and all kinds of people who've moved in there. I mean, it's a smaller population, obviously,

Starting point is 02:10:39 and it's not the scale of Ukraine, but people bail differently. And there's been a devolution of power. And when Brexit happened, Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all. And wanted to kind of still be having a window on Europe. And that's kind of historic. And lots of people in Ukraine have locked West, not East.

Starting point is 02:11:00 It depends on where you are, not just in Levyf, or somewhere like that, but also in Kiev. And Harkev was predominantly Russian-speaking city, but Harkev was also the center of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian literature at different points. People have different views. I grew up in the north of England. We don't feel like the south of England. There's been a massive divide between north and south of England for millennia, not just

Starting point is 02:11:24 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, Zalansky before the war was unpopular. Oh, it was. Well, it was 38 percent, like that, but but best in the popularity. Yeah. Let me sort of make the case that the calculation here is very difficult. If you were to pull every citizen in your view crane and ask them, what do you think happens if Russian vades? Just, actually, each individual Ukrainian in a one-on-one meeting with Putin,

Starting point is 02:12:10 and say, what do you think happens? I honestly think most of them will say that they will agree with the prediction that the government will flee, will collapse, and the country won't unite around the cause because of the factions, because of all the different parties involved, because of the unpopular question. 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

Starting point is 02:12:49 that Russia has been on the offensive, rather than on the defensive. So there's kind of a bit of a flip there. I mean, obviously Afghanistan, but that was more complicated because it was also supposed to be an intervention right, I mean, it wasn't supposed to be to annex Afghanistan. It was to try to prop up kind of a reinstall of a leader there.

Starting point is 02:13:12 Syria, you were in there to help your guy, Bashar al-Assad, turn away the opposition. Chechnya was a debacle. The Chechens fought back big time, and it was only by dint of horrible violent persistence and ruthlessness and nasty dirty tricks that kind of Putin prevailed there. But then you know, you wondered, did he prevail? Because what happened? Chechens, sometimes he describes the most independent part of the Russian Federation in Ramzan Kederov, you know, plays power games in Moscow. Yeah, his predecessors, even his father and others wouldn't have done that. Akman Kederov and, you know, before that, Dadyev and Maschardov, I mean, they were

Starting point is 02:13:56 willing to make a compromise, but, you know, they wouldn't have had, you know, the same position that Kederov 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, can 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, you know, right where I mean, I have Russian friends again

Starting point is 02:14:27 and said, but look what was happening in done yet. Look what was 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're not invaders. I think, again, the special military operation, you know, I think it's flipping, obviously, in the way that with the wall going on there.

Starting point is 02:14:49 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 party rally round, and they were all war one, that fell apart.

Starting point is 02:15:23 I mean, there's our didn't manage to rally everybody around. I mean, the whole thing fell apart. And World War II, Stalin had to revive nationalism, including in the republics, in Central Asia, and elsewhere to revive nationalism. And Ukraine suddenly found nationalism, you know, the kind of census. That's really interesting,

Starting point is 02:15:44 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, clarified. But he might fight now for his country, Ukraine.

Starting point is 02:16:13 Yes, but I'm just like lingering on the point you made, it was not obvious that that united feeling would be there. No, and again, it wouldn't have been obvious with the Soviet Union. That's what, sorry. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Sorry, I was referring to my grandfather, the Soviet Union. We're both saying the exact same thing. Yeah, we know. Yeah, we are.

Starting point is 02:16:32 You're saying it's a really powerful thing because I take it because you take history as it happen, you don't realize it could have happened differently. It's kind of, it's fast. It's that whole counterfactual, right? Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, if you, if you kind of, that's, that's's that whole counterfactual, right? Yeah. Because if you kind of, that's why we all need in the United States to really examine our own history.

Starting point is 02:16:51 Because, you know, there's a lot of lessons from that that we, you know, we should treat very cautiously. It doesn't mean that, you know, history repeats or even rhymes, you know, it's the old axiom all the time. But there are a lot of things that you can take away differently from putting a different perspective and a different slant on the same set of events. I mean, I was used to wonder, how many books can be written on the Fenture Revolution or even on the Russian Revolution? I studied with Richard Pikes, and remember, he was really offended after he'd written his

Starting point is 02:17:18 grip, Michael Serpus on the Russian Revolution, two volumes, other people would write about the Russian Revolution, so I've written it all, and I thought, well, actually, maybe I haven't. There might be some completely different angle there that you haven't really thought of. And that's Putin. I remember Peskov saying, Putin reads history all the time in Russian history. And I thought, well, maybe he should read some world history. Maybe he should kind of read some European authors on Russian history, not just reading Lamanosa for Russian historians on Russian history, because you might see something from a very different perspective.

Starting point is 02:17:52 Look, in the United States, it's made a massive mistake in Vietnam. I mean, Vietnam is kind of weak, manipulative by external forces, China, Soviet Union. But Vietnamese fought for their own country. They suddenly became Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh became, you know, a gun at Berserpie, 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 in that for some reason sprung a thought in my head. As the United States

Starting point is 02:18:28 since World War II had anything that's not a mistake in terms of military operations abroad, I suppose all the ones that are successors we don't even know about probably. So it's like very fast military operations. I mean, Korea is divided. I mean, I don't know what's successful, but you know, kind of, I mean, there was a solution found that, you know, some people are promoting in this case as well, of a sort of division and a, you know, the DMZ and, you know, one side or 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 into some very specific sets of circumstances, and World War I,

Starting point is 02:19:12 they did come in to help liberate parts of Europe, France, and the UK and everything else, Great Britain, and the war towards the end of it. World War II, there was that whole debate about whether the United Association even be part of the wall. I mean, we know it wasn't thought to overturn the Holocaust and all the other kind of things you kind of wish it would be fought for, but it was because of Pearl Harbor

Starting point is 02:19:35 and the Japanese pulling in. But ultimately, it was easy to explain why you were there in a pretty good half to Pearl Harbor and what had happened. It was hard to explain Vietnam you were there, in a particular after Pearl Harbor and what had happened. It was hard to explain Vietnam and Korea and many of those, that's kind of gonna be a problem for Putin, that's why there is a problem for Putin. All of these explanations have been questioned, sort of off on NATO or this or that or the other,

Starting point is 02:20:00 and kind of all liberating Ukraine from Nazis or 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. I became, you know, a great degradation of the Russian multivitour, with atrocities, and people wondering why an earthy United States was in Vietnam.

Starting point is 02:20:27 I mean, that kind of happened in Britain and the colonial kind of pivot as well. Why was the United Kingdom committing atrocities and kind of best of fighting these colonial wars? Northern Ireland, why was the United Kingdom still kind of militarily occupying Ireland. Cyprus, there's all kinds of instances where we're looking at this thing. So, what Russia is doing now, Putin is trying to occupy another country,

Starting point is 02:20:54 irrespective of the historical linkages and the kind of the larger meta-naratives 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?

Starting point is 02:21:36 Well, I think the whole situation here is very complicated and you have to take a much longer view than what happened in 2008 with the up door for Ukraine and Georgia, which actually by the way, I thought was a strategic blunder just to be very clear, because it wasn't any kind of thinking through about what the implications of that would be and what would actually mean for your current security and also bearing in mind what Putin had already said about NATO expansion. They came on the wake of the recognition by the United States, pretty unilaterally, of Kosovo. And it also comes in the wake of what I mentioned before the invasion of Iraq, which really

Starting point is 02:22:10 is very important for understanding Putin's psyche. So I think we have to go back much further than it's not just talking about NATO and what that means. NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine going in a different direction from Russia. Just as those 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 the EU on the security, common security, defense policy, basically has all kinds of connections with NATO, various different levels of European security front. It was all about Europe and going on a different economic and political and ultimately

Starting point is 02:22:57 legal path, because if you have an association agreement eventually you get into the Aki community tent and it just transforms the country completely and Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet period or the Russian Empire period. It becomes, you know, on a different trajectory like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, you know, another country. It becomes a different place. It moves into a different space and that's part of it. But if you go back again to the period at the very beginning of the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, well there's no discussion about NATO at that point and NATO enlargement. There is a lot of pressure, again, as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine, trying to bring it back in the field. I'm wanting to make

Starting point is 02:23:41 what was then, you know, this mechanism for divorce, more of a mechanism for remunaged 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 we had all this panic about what was going to happen with all of that.

Starting point is 02:24:14 I mean I think you know it was a scientist and you know kind of technically would have been difficult for Ukraine to actually use this. I mean the targeting was you know done centrally. They were actually stationed there but nonetheless nonetheless, Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan, certainly became nuclear powers. And Ashkata, the former US defense secretary who just died tragically, and not today, was talking about talking together today, was part of a whole team of Americans and others who 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,

Starting point is 02:24:53 93, 94, you go back and I mean, I was writing about this at the time I wrote a report called Back in the USSA, which is kind of on the website of the Kennedy School with some other colleagues. And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations coming out of Moscow, the defence 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, becoming a menace, and Ukraine might have to be brought to order.

Starting point is 02:25:21 A lot of the dynamics we see now 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 way with all to bring into the country's back again. Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's economy imploded. It had to give sovereignty to all of these constituent parts of the Union, it's economy imploded. It had to give sovereignty to all of these constituent parts of the Russian Federation in terms of a sort of devolution of authority. It had the war in Chechnya, which

Starting point is 02:25:50 reelts in stupidly sparked off in 1994. You had Tata Stan, one of the regions, the whole rich regions, basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow. You had the whole place was kind of seen like it was falling apart. So you couldn't do anything on Ukraine because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it.

Starting point is 02:26:10 And then when kind of basically Russia starts to get its act back together again, all of these security nationalist types who had never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova or anywhere else to kind of move away, they didn't worry that much about Central Asia to be frank, but they did want the core states in their view to come back. Moldova was part of that, even it's not Slavic, but they wanted Belarus and Northern Kazakhstan and probably Kazakhstan as well, which wasn't really thought about

Starting point is 02:26:38 being part of Central Asia back in the fold as close as possible. So anything that gave those countries an alternative was seen as negative. And it could have been an association with China, you know, of them joining, you know, kind of an association with Latin America or Africa or something else like that. But of course, NATO has all of those larger connotations of it being into the Cold War opposing entity. And Putin has always seen NATO as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact, which is, under the words, just something dominated completely by the United States. Now, of course, is why getting back to Trump again,

Starting point is 02:27:15 Trump was always going to the Europeans. If this is really supposed to be collective security and a mutual defense pact, why are you guys not paying? Why does the US state pay for everything? But NATO was actually conceived as collective defense, mutual security, and it was set up by the United States along with the UK and France and Germany and Turkey and other countries.

Starting point is 02:27:38 And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden. They didn't have to join NATO. They didn't want to join NATO for a long time. They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel and the country's partner with NATO. But once they thought that their security was really at rest, they wanted to be part of it. And so, you know, kind of you're now really seeing 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, of Russia being provoked, is

Starting point is 02:28:11 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 been absorbed by this point, you know, by Russia or or mold of a Kazakhstan, or any of the other countries have any kind of agency, like Poland, or Hungary, or France and Britain. For years and years and years, senior people like Putin and people around the Cromon

Starting point is 02:28:41 have demanded a return to the kind of what they call though, the whole constant of Europe, or the kind of what they call the whole constant of Europe or the constant 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 United States it's NATO it's a proxy war or it's this or it's that or this is going to be a nuclear confrontation it's like the Cuban missile crisis, the Euro-missile crisis, it's basically just saying, you know, I want to go back to when the Soviet Union, 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,

Starting point is 02:29:18 or even better, back to Yalta, Potsdam and Tehran and the big meetings at the end of World War II where we resolved the whole future security. We've had a war, we've had the Cold War, now we've got another war, we've got a real war, 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 kind of figure out how to handle this because it has to be handled in a way that Ukraine has agency, because if Ukraine doesn't have agency, nobody else has agency either. Nobody else has any kind of decision-making power. And we have an environment in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players,

Starting point is 02:29:58 those the United States and Russia and China. And maybe occasionally it might be India and perhaps Brazil or some of the South Africa or some other country, that may be the Bricks at some point. But ultimately, it's like the oldest, big powers resolve everything. And so this war is also about Russia's right, Putin's right to determine things, strong man to strong man, big country to big country,

Starting point is 02:30:23 and determine where things happen next. That's why he's talking about things being provoked and it's being the United States fault. Are there parts of the United States establishment that likes that kind of three-party view of the world? Oh, there's always going to be people who like that past, 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 he either kind of pronouncements of people, but you know, this gets back to, you know, the way that the United States operates.

Starting point is 02:30:59 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,-down 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 in the Kremlin is usually fairly orchestrated, usually to kind of flesh out what people think about things. When we had these hardliners saying, we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less, and that the army wasn't doing enough, it was in many respects encouraged by the Kremlin to see how people reacted to that, to create a constituency for being more

Starting point is 02:31:35 ruthless than you had before, because they wanted to clamp down. In the United States, I can say, whatever I want, it doesn't mean that I'm speaking on behalf of the White House. Even if I have been an advisor to this president, I mean, I can say whatever I want, it doesn't mean that I'm speaking on behalf of the White House. And even if I have been an advisor to this president, that president and the other, it doesn't mean I'm basically speaking on behalf of the US government. But there's always an assumption from the Russians that when people say this and people do advocate one thing or over another, that it's operating. There's a lot of mirror imaging, thinking that, you know, we're operating in the same kind of way. So yes, there are, of course, constituencies who think like that would love it. And it'd be back to that. And there are many people out there with their own peaceplans, all kinds of people, you know,

Starting point is 02:32:17 out there, 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. Yeah, but other people do too. I mean, there's always, you know, kind of a checksum in again. You believe in the tension of ideas every idea? I think there is a lot of tension. I mean, I've seen it inside of the government now, you know, and people can push back. And that's why I speak out.

Starting point is 02:32:44 And I try to lay it out so that everybody can, you know, kind of figure out from 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 we've taken our eyes off the ball many times. We've felt to understand the way that people like Putin think. You talked earlier about when we need to have empathy for all the people who like Trump or like Biden and some have their think. We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks

Starting point is 02:33:22 like he does. He has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context. We've got to understand that. We've got to understand that he would take offense or something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know,

Starting point is 02:33:39 we are necessary to blame by taking actions but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly or take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something. 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,

Starting point is 02:34:07 can you advise on what questions, topics, ideas to talk through? To him as a leader, to him as a human? What would you like to understand about his mind, about his thinking? Yeah, remember what I said before the Putin always tries to, you know, reverse things. He wants to hear the questions that people have. Because remember, he himself at different points has been a recruiter, which is, you know, the way that you're operating now as well, right?

Starting point is 02:34:36 You're asking an awful lot of questions. Your questions also betray, you know, often the times that we're thinking about things, you know, the kind of context, you know, kind of, the kind of context, any kind of dialogue like this reveals a lot about the other person. I've often noticed in these settings that Putin likes to have a lot of give and take. I think he would actually enjoy having a conversation with you. But again, he would always be trying to influence you, inform an influence.

Starting point is 02:35:07 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 that you would want to elicit information from him? You're trying to understand the guys of 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 to talk about, you created this particular moment. I mean, one of the problems that I've often seen in the sort of the meetings we've had

Starting point is 02:35:35 with Putin is just ends up in sort of mutual recriminations. You know, kind of know, or what about what you've done or know, you've done that about, you know, and there's always this what aboutism. I mean, it often say, well, you're saying that I've done this, but you've done that. The United States and Verde de Rack, what's the difference between, you know, what I'm doing and all of the things that you've been doing here? I mean, what you would have to try to do is kind of elicit information about why, or what he is thinking about this particular moment in time and why he thinks it.

Starting point is 02:36:07 Yeah, though, what about us as a failure case, I think that shows from all the interviews I've seen that, with him, that just shows that he doesn't trust the person on the other side. No, he doesn't. Right. But I, I'm not cynical like people, they, they seem to think he's some kind of KGB agent that doesn't trust anybody. I disagree. I think everybody's human and from my perspective I'm worried about what I've seen is I think whether it's COVID, whether it's other aspects that I'm not aware of leading up to the invasion, he seems to be less willing to have charismatic back and forth dialogue.

Starting point is 02:36:53 Yeah, an open discussion. You know, actually, I mean, I said, you asked me before about, you know, that issue of trust, and he often says, you know, he's often, you know, distrustful of people, but he just trusts some people for certain things where he knows it's within their competence. So he has people he trusts to do things because 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, 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

Starting point is 02:37:35 things are nuts, right? That they're, 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 him inside the tent and outside, and he moves them around. He gives him multiple chances to redeem themselves if they don't. It's not like he hasn't done any. There is a lot of that in the system. But are the people that he's worked with for a long time, he moves them around to something else, perhaps where they can do less harm. Although, we've often seen that he has quite a small cadre of people that he's rely on, and often they're not up to the task, which is kind of what's happening here.

Starting point is 02:38:09 But also, in the past, has been more straightforward, just like he was saying here, more pragmatic. And I think if you were engaged with him in Russian, while you were actually, literally speaking the same language, because there's so much lost in translation, I used to jump 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, because you were listening to the translation. No, because I know I'm listening to the Russian and the translation. And the translation.

Starting point is 02:38:37 You know in real time. I don't have been able to translate this institute, it's really difficult. Look, an interpreter is a trend in the moment to do something, you know, the Sincroni Piedivot, 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 word in English, you know,

Starting point is 02:39:00 Sincroni Piedivot in Russian. You're kind of focused in the moment on the fragments of the discussion, trying to render it as accurately as you possibly can. And when you come out of that, you can't really layer the entire conversation. And often, you know, what translators do is they take this little shot or not, like journalists do. And afterwards, you know, they've just been caught up

Starting point is 02:39:22 in the moment, and they haven't got the big picture. Consecretive translation is different. You're trying to convey the whole mood of big chunks of dialogue that have already been there, but sometimes you might not get that right either. And it breaks up the flow of the discussion. That's terrible. And often, the person who translates, it's different. Some of our best translators are women.

Starting point is 02:39:46 But you know, hearing a woman's voice, you know, translating a guy who has a particular guy's wave speaking, and a matcho wave speaking, and a crude wave 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 refined female speaker, you've just lost the whole thing. And many of the translators on the Russian side are not competent in English in the way that you would hope there. It's not just that they're not native speakers,

Starting point is 02:40:16 they're just not turned to the same high standards they used to be in the past. And you just lose the new ones, you lose the feel. You almost need kind of the interpretive actor doing the interpretation. You need to match it as much as you can in the way that you do voiceovers in film. The best way to talk to Putin is one-on-one in his own language. I want to have a really great friend here who is one of the best interpreters

Starting point is 02:40:46 of Putin is often asked by the media to interpret for him, he was at the institute that I was, I mean, I know him from that kind of period. And he is just excellent, just like Pavel Plashenko was absolutely phenomenal at interpreting Gorbachev. Now he didn't always interpret him accurately because Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaffes and sometimes was Gorbachev. Now, he didn't always interpret him accurately because Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaps and sometimes was Gorbachev himself would joke that Palashenko spoke better for Gorbachev than Gorbachev could himself. But Putin is actually quite precise and careful

Starting point is 02:41:15 in the way that he speaks because there's a lot of menace sometimes to things to liberate other times as lots of humor and he's telling a joke for a particular reason. And all of it, I mean, he actually uses the richness of the Russian language and the crujity of language that can't be conveyed in English. Process facial expressions that go along with that.

Starting point is 02:41:31 Body language, the way that he sits back in the chair and slouches the kind of the way that he makes fun of people and he kind of uses irony. Just some of it is just lost and it needs to be conveyed. The depth of humor and wit, I've met quite a few political leaders like that in the speak only Russian, when I was traveling in Ukraine. I don't know how you translate that.

Starting point is 02:41:55 I think it's almost, the other person that reminds me, like that a little bit is Obama. There's, Obama had a wit and intelligence, but he would smile as he sets something that adds a lot to it. Like, that he's trolling you or he's being sarcastic or I don't mean converting it towards. It's obvious that all English speakers, if they listen to Obama, but if you have to translate

Starting point is 02:42:21 to a different language, I think you're going to lose a lot of that. Yeah, I mean, when I watched many of Putin speeches, just in Russian, not looking at any of the subtitles or anything, and it's just watching the word that his body language is at the time when he's saying things, the way that you smoke, he'll sneer, he'll laugh, he'll add lib, kind of from something that obviously wasn't there

Starting point is 02:42:42 on the prepared speech. And it's really critical. And some people speak, Trump, it just needs words. Putin, the words are very important. Trump, it's the atmosphere, it's the way you feel about things, it's the buzz you get, it's revving people up. It's the slogans. Putin is, you know, peace conveying people up. It's the kind of slogans and Putin is, you know, he's conveying a lot. And what he's saying that.

Starting point is 02:43:08 I think, I mean, of course, I don't know much because I only speak Russian in English, but I have in English or Russian have not met almost anyone ever as interesting in conversation as Putin. I think he shines not in speeches, but in interactions with others. Yeah, when you watch those interviews and things with him, and I've been at many of these sessions, it's been hours of him piring questions, and it's like watching a boxer sparring in a kind of training bout. Yeah, come and give me another one. You know, and it's kind of like, and he prides himself and he's made mistakes

Starting point is 02:43:47 often, but the breadth of, you know, the issues that he's often covered has been interested in, has been fascinating and I used to just take, you know, kind of really detailed notes about this because you learn a term, but it's also about his worldview again. I mean, he does live in a certain box like we all do. And I mean, he does live in a certain box like we all do. And, you know, again, his world experiences 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.

Starting point is 02:44:18 He's been telegraphing this grievance, dissatisfaction, this, I'm going to do something for you. And the thing is during war time, the combined with propaganda, and the narratives of resentment and grievance that you dig in on those. Like, maybe you start out not believing it, but you're sure it's all going to believe it eventually. Well, you convince yourself of time. Yeah. Look, the longer you're in position like Putin, 22 years now, come at 123 years, could be out there

Starting point is 02:44:57 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 been 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. And again, I used to have these arguments with Professor Pais about Lenin because he would talk about Lenin, but he didn't change his mind from being a teen. Now, he not thought about that. I mean, it's like we're not formed, fully formed in individuals at 18. We don't know anything. We know something, but not everything. I mean, that obviously the younger context, you know, the kind of the way that you kind of grow up,

Starting point is 02:45:36 the players, you grow up, the things that happened, you the traumas you have. I mean, all of these have an impact. But 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. And he, you know, he's not doing the kind of things he used to do, yeah, he gets out there and he goes to Kazakhstan and, you know, got him Tajikistan and he goes to China and he does this, and that, and then to COVID, he didn't go anywhere. I mean, very few places. And so he got stuck. And that worries me a lot because you could see before that he had a bit more

Starting point is 02:46:10 of flexibility of thought. And that's why nobody should be in place forever. You should always get out there and go out there and learn a new skill. He needs to sort of get out more and do something different. You had an interesting point. You've made that both Lonennem and Zelensky and Putin are thinking about their just politicians. They're thinking about the 2024 election, which is coming up for both of them.

Starting point is 02:46:37 Yeah, I've said that in some of the other interviews. Yeah, that's true. That's so interesting. I mean, I- Because their election is going to be pretty much at the same time. As the US election Also, there's will be before I mean because sometime in that you know early part of the year with the president selection Yeah, and also I don't know if you know about US elections, but they actually last way longer than the year Well, they go for it now, aren't we you know already already starting So there's going to be a significant overlap

Starting point is 02:47:02 Yeah, you know, you're right that actually comes into play in their calculus? I think it was one of the reasons why Putin invaded in February 2022 because it was going to be two years, I mean, he thought it'd be over by March of 2022. And he got two years to prepare for, you know, the election and you 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 Alex Singh, or invading Ukraine, the first time Alex in Crimea. I mean, one of the reasons for inverting Crimea and Alexing, or inverting Ukraine, the first time Alexing Crimea was, look, what happened to his ratings?

Starting point is 02:47:29 They went from kind of declining, and it was still pretty good, you know, by anybody's standards, to just rocketing off into the stratosphere. I mean, I didn't mean any of me anybody in Russia who thought that Alexing Crimea was, you know, kind of a bad thing. I mean, even, you know, kind of people

Starting point is 02:47:42 who were post-pooking on some of the other things, Crimea was, you know, Krimnash, they kept saying, you know, this is kind of, you know, kind of people who were post-puping on some of the things, it was crime. It was, you know, cream Nash, they kept saying, you know, this is kind of, you know, we got it back, you know, it should never have gone away. It was hours, 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 into special mulch operation, he was going to try to turn it into what Belarus has become, you know, part of a, you know, bring back the Commonwealth of Indian Bend State, or the Union, then a new union with Belarus and Ukraine and Russia over time.

Starting point is 02:48:11 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 Danyetsk and Lukansk, you knowukanski. That was also a possibility. But it wasn't in his intention, and it cares to have something on this kind of scale. He wanted to get on with them, preparing for what was going to be. He would think the cakewalk, the shoe

Starting point is 02:48:35 in, of the next president election. I mean, last time around, he had to invite a bit of competition with his person who's reputed to be his goddaughter, because he's subjacked for a bit of entertainment for people. The next time around, maybe he wasn't really planning on running against any other serious opposition. He was just going to have the acclaim of the great leader, like President Xi, in China. Putin was basically, I think he also hoped that he would be able to devolve some authority

Starting point is 02:49:06 away, so he's more like the supreme leader figure, the Zalaiq figure, the monarch, and then other people get on with the chief executive, prime minister, or run in the country, and he could step back and just enjoy this. Maybe there was going to be a new union of Belarus, Russia, I can just enjoy this. Maybe there was going to be, again, a new union of Belarus, Russia, and then Ukraine and some, you know, fascism. He preside over that. So speaking of opposition, you've criticized

Starting point is 02:49:34 the famed Putin critic, Alexey Navalny. What's the nature of your criticism? Well, it's really been a kind of a criticism in the way that people have implied, but more just reminding people that there only isn't some stooge of the West as other people have depicted him in the Russian firm, but saying that this is kind of, he's pro-Western. He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. In the past, he's articulated things are of dissimilar from some of the people around Putin. And it's more just reminding people that, you know,

Starting point is 02:50:07 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 going to be, you know, what you think they are. And like Siniv Alni is a Russian. And, you know, in a particular Russian context,

Starting point is 02:50:23 he's different from Putin, but he wouldn't necessarily kind of run the Russian system in words that we will like. So that's kind of a criticism. It's more of a critique of the way that we look at things. I think it's a mistake to always say, oh, this is pro-Western, or this is a liberal, I mean, what does that mean pro-Western? I mean, he's a Russian, he's a Russian nationalist in the Russian Patriot, and he's often, you know, been, you know, quite

Starting point is 02:50:49 critical about immigration. He's had some negative views about, you know, one part of my mind is I don't feed the Caucasus, you know, kind of played upon some of the, you know, the racial and ethnic tensions inside of, you know, Russia itself as well. Now he is a pluralist and he's kind of wants to have a different set of political actors there, but he also isn't promoting revolution, he's not Lenin, he's not wanting to bring down the state. He wants to kind of change the people who are in charge, that's what he's being best of be focused on, and you know, he might have and have things done do things that you know, we elsewhere might not like. And I guess the bigger picture there is

Starting point is 02:51:37 it's not trivial to know that if you place another human in power to replace the current human in power that things are going to be better, they could be a lot worse because there's a momentum to a system. A system is bigger than just this leader, even when that leader has a huge amount of power. That's absolutely right. He grew up in that same system. Now he's younger than Putin, so he's got a different generational perspective.

Starting point is 02:52:00 He's not weighted to the Soviet Union, or some concept of the Russian Empire, it doesn't seem to spend a lot of time. I don't know what he's not wedded to the Soviet Union or some concept of the Russian Empire. It doesn't seem to spend a lot of time. I don't know what he's doing in jail, but he's probably not sitting around reading Lomanova and the great kind of tracts of Russian history could be, actually. But I think Navalny has a different worldview and a different perspective, just like Medvedev was different in his time in Presency and made some changes and some innovations there. But don't think that they're gonna be radically different

Starting point is 02:52:29 because the Gorbachev, I mean, he was so different from Andropov and Chinyanko, and this is the person. But he was also constrained by the system. And he wanted to have change, but he wanted evolution to be changed. He didn't know how to do it, but he didn't wanna bring the whole system down. Look, a crush off when he wanted evolution, we changed, he didn't know how to do it, but he didn't want to bring the whole system down. Look at Krushov when he came in, after that whole period of

Starting point is 02:52:50 everybody trying to figure out what to do after Stalin had died, and it was all this back and forth, and eventually Krushov emerges. 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. It kind of brings all kinds of elements of chaos there in order to the whole thing. And you know, gets into a stand-off of the United States, but we know as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and eventually, you know, gets removed. You know, we're looking at what's happening in the United Kingdom right now. You know, we've just churned through three prime ministers and actually five prime ministers in, you know, kind of as many years.

Starting point is 02:53:27 But all of those prime ministers have come out of the context of the conservative party and the whole, you know, kind of just sheds 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 the first Indian or Anglo-Indian Prime Minister in British history. It was a kind of phenomenal kind of a child of Indian immigrants, but also a person of privilege from the same academic and party background as the others. 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?

Starting point is 02:54:09 Well, Putin's definitely been thinking about it, right? I mean, he is the kind of person. If he's got an instrument, he wants to figure out how to use it. We look at Polonium, we look at Novichok, we look at all kinds of things. He's also presided over in Syria. He has put in charge of the war in Ukraine now, General Syverikin is known as General Armageddon, the kind of person who pretty much facilitated

Starting point is 02:54:33 the use of chemical weapons in Syria, for example. So don't think that Putin hasn't thought about how ruthless he can possibly be. The question is really the calculation. It says his estimation of the probability that we'll get the desired effect. We keep talking about this idea of escalate to de-escalate. That's not what the Russians, you know, how they call it,

Starting point is 02:54:54 but it's the whole idea that you do something really outrageous to get everybody else to back off. Now, when you talked about the precedent that the United States set of detonating the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what, you know, he obviously meant the precedent of using nuclear weapons, of course, which of course we would then say, well, we showed then how the impermissibility of overdoing that again. But what he's talking about is the precedent of escalating to such an extent that you stopped

Starting point is 02:55:24 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 and being written about that. And of course, the revolution that people felt in the work of that was just the shock of what actually happened and we've spent 70 years basically coming to terms with the fact

Starting point is 02:55:56 that we did something like that, the fire bombing. We've also looked at all the bombing in Vietnam and everywhere and all these massive bombing campaigns are realizing that they actually often had the opposite effect. A Russian man like Asagi might have contributed. And there's a lot of, you know, scholarships just at the end of the wall. But all of the big bombing campaigns

Starting point is 02:56:15 the destruction actually prolonged was because they made people fight back as we kind of seen in the case of Ukraine. So Putin has to calculate the probability that if he uses some tactical nuclear weapon, that it will get the desired effect, which is get us to capitulate and Ukraine to capitulate. Oster capitulate meaning the United States and Europeans, not supporting Ukraine anymore, pushing towards a negotiating table and negotiating Ukraine away.

Starting point is 02:56:38 And Ukraine is saying, okay, we give up, like happened happens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. So it's his calculation, you know, as much as anything else, which is really important. He said, we have to show him that he won't get that out of it. It's kind of less our probability and, you know, kind of the odds of it. It's just how he calculates that probability of assessing what he wants. I mean, I guess that's how the game of poker works. It's your probability, and your estimate of their probability, and your estimate of their estimate of your probability. Yeah, so it goes on. Yeah, exactly. I think there's two tools, right? So one is actually the actual user nuclear weapons, and then the threat of the user. Oh, the threat is very effective.

Starting point is 02:57:20 And the more real you make the threat, That's right. So the more you approach the actual use, I get very close to using it. Already using Chernobyl, Zaparizia, and then usional cranes, the other nuclear reactor. So he's using civilian nuclear reactors as a dirty bomb. So, you know, it's ironic that he has Shouyueu, his defense minister calling people up to the Ukraine to use a dirty bomb. They're already doing it. I mean, what is, you know, kind of more destructism stirring up all the radioactive dust and Chernobyl as you send you tubes through, you know, for example, or shelling, you know, the Chernobyl plant and the sarcophagus and putting it at risk. And Zaparisi, you've got the international atomic energy agency

Starting point is 02:58:05 running out there in a panicked and kind of also trying to intervene in the conflict. So you're putting civilian nuclear reactors at risk. I mean, that also has a great added effect of cutting off Ukraine's power supply because Zaparisi in particular was, was it a third of Ukraine's power generation or some really high percentage

Starting point is 02:58:26 I'll have to go back and take a look at that. But that's a two-fer. It's a double effect there of undermining power generation, also frightening Germans and others who have already been very worried about nuclear power and increasing leverage on that energy front, but also scaring people, not from the perspective of the use of nuclear weapon. Those reactors also become a nuclear weapon tactically deployed. And as you said, the discussion of using a nuclear weapon and engendering all those fears, and he's already got an effect. Everyone's running around talking about the Cuban missile crisis

Starting point is 02:59:02 and secret diplomacy, and how we negotiate a way Ukraine in return for Putin not blowing up a nuclear weapon. So, he's got a lot of people I was talking about that. So, sorry for the difficult and dark question. It could be for you directly or more like, do you think we have a plan for this? What happens if he does drop a nuclear weapon? Do you have a sense that the United States has a good plan? I know we're talking about it. I think we probably have several plans because it depends on what where, when, how? But don't and also don't these things happen very quickly. But it also don't these things happen very quickly.

Starting point is 02:59:49 Well, there's also signaling and signs of movement there. I mean, I want to be very, you know, kind of careful about this, but in the thing is it's also very important that we do this with other nuclear powers. So the other thing that's different from how it might have been in the past, and particularly different from the Cuban missile crisis and the Urem missile crisis,

Starting point is 03:00:03 we're not the only nuclear players. China key players. China 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 is behaving like a rogue state just to be very clear. And this is what we've got with Kim Jong Un in North Korea. We've also got India and Pakistan. And we've got other states that we're not supposed to talk about, that we know how nuclear capacities,

Starting point is 03:00:32 and others that would like to have nuclear capacity. And the whole question here is about also proliferation. Getting back to that time when Ukraine had nuclear weapons, at least there on its territory in Saudi Belarus and Kazakhstan, you've got to wonder, was it wise for them to give it up? We were worried about kind of loose nukes, nuclear weapons, kind of getting out of hand proliferation at the time. We wanted fewer nuclear powers, Russia wanted that too.

Starting point is 03:00:59 Now we're going to have more, we've got more. And what Putin is saying is, well, that was stupid, if Ukraine, to give up the nuclear weapons. In fact, my colleagues and I, back in our report and back in the US, are kind of suggested they shouldn't give them up. And then that's why we had the Budapest Mam around them. That's why the United States and the United Kingdom in particular have, you know, basically some responsibility in obligation going back to 1994 when they promise 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. What about nuclear proliferation? If you're South Korea, Japan,

Starting point is 03:01:38 you're any other country that's kind of worrying about your neighbors. And what might happen to you? Just like India and Pakistan, both like, we've got to 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. Why should the Iranians be the only one with an Islamic nuclear weapon? And if we know that Iran has break up capacity now, the Saudis and all the other states that

Starting point is 03:02:08 are in opposition to Iran, we'll also want to have some nuclear capacity. And the United States, before, wanted to maintain everything under the nuclear umbrella. You know, one of the reasons why Sweden and Finland are joining NATO is because of suddenly all of these nuclear threats. Sweden was actually the last country on the planet to want to have nuclear weapons. They were actually pushing for a ban on nuclear weapons and ignitions. Now that Putin is doing the nuclear saber-attling, they're talking about joining and on the verge of joining a nuclear alliance. See what's happening here.

Starting point is 03:02:38 So we have to make it more and more difficult for Putin to be even contemplated. 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 infrastructures he's doing. You can use subversion.

Starting point is 03:02:58 We're worried about all of the undersea cables, all these weird things happening off Orkney or in the Mediterranean, or all these other things that are happeningkney or in the Mediterranean or all these other things that are happening, not streamed to pipelines, other infrastructure, there's all kinds of other things that you can do as well here. It's not just, again, there's a civilian nuclear threat of blowing up one of the reactors. Now, it's going to be sure about where the wind turns and the wind blows. And there's all kinds of things to factor in here, but Putin is definitely sitting around calculating

Starting point is 03:03:29 whether the people, what can I do to turn this around? I mean, he still thinks that he can win this. Or, in other words, he can end it on his terms, Crimea, Danyets, Luchansk, Herzogs, Zapadiće. And, you know, capitulation. All recognized as being part of Russia. Oh, he can freeze it, and then, you know, kind of figure about where it goes from there.

Starting point is 03:03:56 What other pressure he can put on? I mean, I'm sure he's confident he can get rid of Zylensky. And he can prevail over us. I mean, not coming to the UK, it's 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, he can have an impact on the political scene in Europe and elsewhere. I mean, again, everyone's talking about winter coming and I don't put in thinking, yeah, great, I've destroyed the infrastructure

Starting point is 03:04:25 of you. 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've got the home front to think about as well. Putin has declared war on us. We did that on September 30th, and so he's done it at other points as well.

Starting point is 03:04:45 We've just not paid attention, but he pretty much is pretty explicit in September 30th. I mean, go back and watch that speech. And he is gambling that people will go back to basically taking Russian gas and oil, but it's not gonna be that simple as well. And to people, and then the question has to be, do we really kind of think he's not going to be that simple as well. And to people, and then, you know, the question has to be, do we really kind of think he's going to play fair after that

Starting point is 03:05:08 when he's kind of also shown that he can leverage that? It's such a complicated world. It is complicated. It's very complicated. And it's never, I mean, it feels like things are heating up. Like, and China is very quiet right now. Because they're watching what happens. I mean, for President Xi, he's trying to consolidate his power even further after the party Congress, but he doesn't want to look like he made a mistake by backing Putin.

Starting point is 03:05:39 I mean, he thought Putin was also going to be in out. Ukraine would probably be open for massive Chinese investment. China was the largest investor in Ukraine before the war. Largest single investor, I mean the EU was bigger of course. How do you hope the war ends in Ukraine? Well, I mean, I do hope it ends with a cease-fire and a negotiated solution, but it has to be with Russia compromising on something. And that's not where we are right now.

Starting point is 03:06:08 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 legitimately doesn't want to compromise right now. Yeah, because somebody looked, the thing is that for Ukraine right now, anything is a compromise at its expense, right?

Starting point is 03:06:31 Fast devastation, unbelievable casualty rates, biggest refugee crisis in World War II, Russia's just said, sorry, this is our territory, it's not just Crimea, I think there could have been an negotiation over that. But you know, Donetsk and Lukansk, 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 is basically saying, sorry, we've taken this. And any other negotiations, just you recognizing this, for us not doing more destruction.

Starting point is 03:07:06 That is not the basis for negotiation. Having people come and laying those terms down is not a starting position. I think Russia is also in a dilemma of its own making now, because Putin has made it very difficult to compromise just by everything that he's set. Now, if you pray and they've already won a great moral political and military victory, it's just hard to see it, right, at the particular moment. They've done what the Finns did in the Winter War, which the Finns were devastated by the Winter War as well, but they've pushed them back.. Now the Finns lost a lot of territory, thus Karelia and huge spheres of territory, but they got to be Finland. And now they're joining NATO, but they've been part of the EU. The question is how to get Ukraine to be Ukraine in a success. But that's the challenge. Again, they've already won

Starting point is 03:08:01 Yes. But, you know, is, and that's the challenge. Now, again, they've already won psychologically, politically, militarily, because Putin hasn't succeeded in what he wanted to do, but he has succeeded in completely and utterly devastating them. And this is the kind of the old musk-evite, the old Russian imperial, old servic mentality, you know, going all the way back to when the musk-evites were the bagmen for the, you know, the horde, for the Mongols. It was destruction. You know, you don't play with us. We'll destroy you.

Starting point is 03:08:30 You know, people talk about it as mafia, but it's older. You know, I only have to go down and see Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublyov. I mean, I remember, you know, seeing that film when I was first as a student in Moscow and just being, whoa, this is so brutal. I mean, this is just unremittingly brutal because the whole point is that you show people who's the boss. The destruction is the point of things as well because, you know, you are emphasising your domination. And that's what Putin is doing right now is saying, okay, you want to go in a different direction, so be it, but I'm going to make you suffer. Remember when Hodorkovsky got out of the penal colony when Putin let him out eventually, he said he suffered enough.

Starting point is 03:09:19 But he suffered for 10, 11 years. I don't think Putin feels that Ukraine is suffered enough at this point. Or we have suffered enough. So there's a part of this invasion that's punishment for something. Yeah, it's medieval. I mean, look, we're all capable of the same things, right? There was all that destruction and that's what Assad was like in Syria, like his father, you destroy because you teach him a lesson. And look, Britain did that,

Starting point is 03:09:45 the colonial era. I mean, all the history of British colonialism is exactly the same. I mean, all the malmau, you know, in Kenya, you know, up until recent times, brutality. Teaching people, you know, teaching them a lesson, you have to suffer. The U.S. 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. And different points in history, 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 United States, we ideally are trying to do better and most

Starting point is 03:10:21 of Europe is trying to do better as well. Think about France and Algeria, again, we can see this in many different settings. But I think if a Putin right now, he hasn't taught all of us sufficient a lesson. I just, I talked to hundreds of people in Ukraine and the tough thing, they're inspiring things that there's a unity,

Starting point is 03:10:43 the tough thing is a lot of them speak intensely of hate towards not just Russia, but Russians. That's how Europeans felt about Germany and Germans at the end of World War II. And a generational hate, like, I don't think that hate is going to pass. While it might, 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 in like, in 30 years, more than 30 years after the end of the war.

Starting point is 03:11:16 My grandfather, who'd fought in World War I, wouldn't speak to my parents when they sent me on a, I mean, he hadn't fought in World War II, we fought World War I,, we hit the Germans. And he did not want me going, you know, to Germany is an ex-Gent, you know, refused to meet, you know, kind of the German kid who, you know, came to stay at my house, you know, for example, I mean, it takes a long time to, you know, it takes a long time to get over that.

Starting point is 03:11:40 But you do, I mean, and we have, we have in Europe, and that was the whole point of all that kind of exercise of European unity after World War II. Now, the big challenge is, what do we do with Russia? Because a lot of people are talking, we can't have European security without Russia, the people are saying, we can't have a Europe kind of with Russia. So, how do we deal with this? We've got to basically, it's going to 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

Starting point is 03:12:23 thinking about this. I mean, Gorbachev, before tried to do in the late 1980s with the black a lot of the things that we've done before. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important.

Starting point is 03:12:40 And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. 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'm an amazing people. You just talked about hundreds of people that you've met within Ukraine. And people all think differently. Contextes and circumstances change, and people can evolve.

Starting point is 03:13:01 Some people get stuck, Putin's got stuck, but people can evolve. Some people get stuck, Putin's got stuck, but people can evolve. And 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 what we did on COVID or done on other diseases and things. And look, there is some similarities as a pathology around war and conflict. Years ago in the 1990s, I worked on a lot of projects that were funded by the Khanika Corporation

Starting point is 03:13:37 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, 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

Starting point is 03:13:58 deal with this? And we did come up with all kinds of ideas and things that are still out there. We've created institutions that have helped to keep the peace. We just neglected them, allowed them to degrade just like the United Nations. And we've created problems inside of them, like the veto power of the permanent powers on the UN Security Council. But we can change that. You're just going to have a will.

Starting point is 03:14:25 And I do think out there, there are sufficient people with a will, and we've just got to get people mobilized. I mean, I'm always amazed by how people can mobilize themselves around a crisis. Remember Winston Churchill, I don't quite all the time, because I can never remember half his quotes. But I do remember the one about, never let a good crisis go to waste.

Starting point is 03:14:42 And I always think that that, you know, yeah, that we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste. And I always think that that, you know, yeah, that we should, we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste. And something else can come out of this, just like in Ukraine, we've worried before about corruption in Ukraine, the influence of the oligarchs, we've got to 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, 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?

Starting point is 03:15:07 I mean, I'm feeling a bit on the oldest side now, but I still feel like I got a bit of, you know, kind of youth within me at, at 57. I'm not that old, but I'm not that young. But we have to work together with younger and older people. You might work together in coalitions of, you know, across generations. You're a remind me of kids who just graduated college and say, and I feel old.

Starting point is 03:15:28 So 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, it's like things like that. Yeah, but I find it interesting. But you know, when I was a room 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. 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. You're funny, sound, accent, being another or just representation of class but in general

Starting point is 03:16:06 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. Well, we all have a voice, right? We all have agency.

Starting point is 03:16:30 We all actually have the ability to do something. And you can start small in your local community, or even in your own classroom, just helping somebody else out or speaking up and advocating on behalf of things. You know, when I was about 11 years old, I got involved with other kids on Save the Wales. We had all this, we had the Greta Sundberg, but we got together in a network writing to people and trying to raise money to help save the world. Now, actually, the Wales of the world are doing somewhat better. I can't say that that was because of me in my network, but it's kind of a way of organizing and kind of joining in at a larger movement. Everybody can be part

Starting point is 03:17:10 of something bigger. The thing is, it's all about working together with others and giving other people a chance as well. I think one thing is that our voices have more impact when they're amplified. They don't have to be the voices of discord or the voices of hate. You've been trying to do this with your podcasts, kind of give people a voice, give them a kind of platform, and get them to join in with other people. One of the things that I've been trying to do

Starting point is 03:17:37 is go and talk to just as many people as I possibly can and say, look, we can all do something here. We can all lend our voices to a cause can all do something here. We can all lend our voices to a cause that we care deeply about. We can be kind to each other. We can give other people a chance. We can kind of speak out while we see that something is wrong. And we can try to explain things to people. And what I'm trying to do with the moment is just sort of explain, what I've learned about things. And I hope that that helps people make informed judgments of their own and that, you know, it kind of maybe take things further and learn something more. It's like kind of building up on, you know, the knowledge, you

Starting point is 03:18:12 know, that I have, you know, to try to import, but isn't everybody can do that different ways? You can kind of write reach back, if the 14 helps some of you seven for 21, help somebody who's 14, you know, kind of if, you of in the kind of my age now, I'm always trying to reach back and work with younger people, listen to younger people, help them out, make connections for them, listen to what they have to say about something, try to incorporate that and 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.

Starting point is 03:18:45 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, where there are 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 are always, there are always where, I mean, there were lots of points where I was just despondent, but then, you know, I'd meet somebody

Starting point is 03:19:18 who would just suddenly turn things around. I was this luck or was I out there looking for it? You know, sometimes, you know for it? Sometimes, if you're open and receptive to hearing something from someone else, there are often times where I thought so, despondent, in such a black mood, I didn't think I'd be able to go on, and then I'd have a chance conversation with somebody. I remember sitting on a bench, it was probably 11 or 12, just crying my eyes out, just really upset. And all the ladies came and sat next to me, put a ram around me, said, oh, it's all right, Pat.

Starting point is 03:19:47 Well, some other, 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 sat 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, but it was about anymore.

Starting point is 03:20:06 Now it just seems inconsequential at the time. I probably thought my life was at an end. Sometimes people make an eye contact with you in the street and saying something to you can pull you out of something. It's kind of, I think we just have to open yourself up to the prospect of not everyone's bad, just like you were saying before, that there's good in everybody, even during that really difficult period of the impeachment, I was trying to listen very carefully to people. And I thought, we still have something in common here. We need to remember that. When people are forgetting who they are or the

Starting point is 03:20:42 context and they're operating, there's always something that can pull you back again. There's always that kind of thread. So I'm sure you were probably attacked by a lot of people and you were still able to keep that optimism that you... Well, I kept it into kind of perspective. When I was a kid, I mean, things are going to be, if I got bullied, you know, kind of again, and I tried to win some, why they're doing this. One of the most amazing things that happened, you know, really almost my, my dad was a pretty incredible person and he would always open my eyes to something. I was getting bullied really nastly by a girl at school. And my dad started asking me questions about her. And one day,

Starting point is 03:21:23 my dad said, we were going to go for a walk. And my time's very small. Remember it's very depressed, really, you know, deprived area. And we go to this housing estate, public housing place that's not too far away from where I live. And it's really, you know, kind of one of the most rundown places, and not ready to run down place. My dad, like, knocks on the door and I said, what are we doing, dad? And I say he says, we're going off to, you know, we're going to visit somebody, you know, a family friend, I think I've even known, you know, a distant relative, knock on the door,

Starting point is 03:21:49 and this old man answers the door and he's, oh, Alfie, my dad's name is Alf Alfie, you know, kind of fancy senior, you haven't seen you come on in, have a cup of tea, what are you doing? He said, oh, I'm just walking past him, my daughter, we're going for a trip, there we're going for a walk. And then suddenly I see that girl,

Starting point is 03:22:04 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 a grandfather and she'd been abandoned by a parents and she was living in you know pretty dire circumstances and she'd been getting raised by a grandfather and she was just miserable. And the reason she was bullying me was to make herself feel better. And after that, she never bullied me again.

Starting point is 03:22:30 And we didn't even talk. Because there was a connection mode. And suddenly she realized that her grandfather was the only person she had. New my dad, and there were some, they were friends, or they were even family, some kind of relationship there. I mean, I was arrested half of North of England. I had no idea we were related You know everybody was some roles. It's people have lived there for generations again

Starting point is 03:22:51 It's 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 So much of something else going on their lives So much is just don't know many. And I shouldn't take it personally, because I don't have a personal connection with half of these people who are out there saying that this has not happened to me. Well, thank you for the kindness and empathy still carrying your heart. I can see it through all the you must have gone through in the 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,

Starting point is 03:23:26 for the work you continue to write and to do it. This seems like a really, really difficult time for human civilization on a topic that you're a world expert in. So don't mess it up. No, I know what that sounds like. Everybody have that. Let's just let's just keep it together, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:23:43 Exactly. Let's just keep it together. Your words have a lot of power. Also, it's a really, really tricky time. So thank you so much, given how valuable your time is to sit down with me today. It was on honor. No, 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.

Starting point is 03:24:12 Fear corrupts. Perhaps the fear of the loss of power. Thank you for listening. And I hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman Podcast - #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump

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