The Bulwark Podcast - Fiona Hill: Putin and the Art of Manipulating Trump

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Donald Trump is so enamored with Vladimir Putin he doesn't even know the Russian leader is regularly making fun of him in ways that can’t easily be translated. Trump is also running the White House like it's the Kremlin, with backdoor deals, quick enrichment schemes, nefarious activities, and cronies calling the shots—while people in official positions, like Marco, are just fig leaves. It’s the exact kind of political world where Putin flourishes. And his operation against the United States continues apace. Plus, the backstory on the proposed Venezuela-Ukraine swap, Trump's TACO on Greenland, Canada and Europe have had enough of the U.S. and buying American, Western allies don’t trust Vance’s dependence on tech bros, and hello: Ozempic is a Danish drug.The one and only Fiona Hill joins Tim Miller.show notes Fiona's memoir, " There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century" Fiona's book, "Mr. Putin: The Operative in the Kremlin" David Frum's interview with Fiona

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted. Welcome to the show, a former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council during part of Trump's first term. She's also a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Currently, a senior fellow in foreign policy at Brookings. Her books include her memoir. There's nothing for you here, finding opportunity in the 21st century. It's Fiona Hill. How you doing? I'm doing all right. Thanks, Tim. to be with you. I've been kind of a little bit of a Fiona Hill fan girl for like six years now, you know, not fully. So I'm not fully briefed on your whole story. And so I thought, you know, in 2018 and 19 in this period in Trump 1.0, these kind of characters emerged into our lives,

you know, because people had to pay attention to things that normal people didn't pay attention to, you know, like what happened on national security briefing calls between Eastern European countries and presidential advisors. And so for a lot of those people, they kind of like, like you, they emerge from the ether. Like, how did you find yourself testifying in Donald Trump's first impeachment, I guess? Could you give us like a little life story that landed you in that place? Yeah, I certainly ask myself that, you know, many times. I'm also glad to say that we came out, we came out the ether rather than the primordial swamp,

which everybody else, you know, kind of as sort of accuses all of doing. I mean, look, I mean, you know, I started off life in a rather unexpected place. I mean, some of the people listening to this will know, you know, I start off Northern England, daughter of a coal miner or a nursed while coal miner because all the mines closed down. My dad became a hospital porter. My mother, you know, was a midwife in, you know, one of those early baches of midwives trained by the National Health Service that kind of call the midwife from the BBC series. That makes you feel like you're 300 years old to say that your mother is a man. I just turned 60.

So I'll buy it and actually. Oh, looking great for 60. Well, thank you very much. When I look back at, you know, the little few pictures of my childhood, it certainly seems. like it was in the 19th century, let alone the 20th, you know, it was like a totally

world away from this. But the whole point was, you know, thanks to expansion of education in the UK, you know, I get the education. My parents never did.

It's actually a great American story, actually, for people of my age in America as well. I get, you know, kind of funding to go to school, to university. I decide to study Russian

because it's the peak of the Cold War. And like many other people of my generation, you know, I was obsessed with the risks of nuclear Armageddon and thought, you know, we'd die in a ditchler and listening to sirens as, you know, various places were blown up in an exchange between the US and the Soviet Union. I decided to

study Russian. I get a scholarship to study Russian. And then, you know, a long story shot, I'm getting a scholarship to the United States and, you know, amazingly to Harvard to study in what was in the Soviet Union program. And as soon as I duly got a master's in Soviet studies, the Soviet Union went up and left on me, collapsing. multiple parts and I decided I studied history. Not great news for your career, but good for the world. Yeah, yeah. It was the ash heap of history.

So I thought, well, history. And I read it better, you know, retrain quickly, retool. You know, and my dad had gone from being a mind hospital porter. I didn't quite make the same transition, but I, you know, so did history. I ended up, you know, doing lots of various things around at Harvard. I get a job with Graham Allison, the famous, you know, Kennedy School of government professor who's still going strong into his 80s. writing all kinds of things. I mean, somebody who, you know, many of our listeners are very familiar

with. And it's, you know, working with Graham as, you know, one of his many assistants. You know, I end up into the world of public policy and, you know, I end up variously getting, you know, when I've graduated with everything and finished working with him, jobs down in Washington, D.C. And it's all about timing because, you know, it spent all of this time looking at the, you know, what had happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union to all the different constituent parts. Why wasn't it moving in the directions that we anticipated? And I start getting, you know, kind of a bit of an obsession back in 2000 as I'd landed at the Brookings Institution as a fellow then with a colleague Clifford Gaddy, who was, you know, pretty well-known expert on Russia and the

Russian economy. We started getting a bit of a fixation on Vladimir Putin, who's still with us, of course. This is in 2000. And so for the last 25 years, I've been one way or another, you know, trying to figure out what makes Vladimir Putin tick. And it was because of that. And, you know, various other forays lent being loaned out by Brookings, the National Intelligence Council, writing a book about Putin to try to figure out who is this guy, you know, why is he still here? Why is he likely to be here to infinity and beyond that I ended up getting asked to join the Trump administration? It was literally through connections that I'd made being loaned out to the government in a much earlier period in the 2000s at the end of Bush

and leading into Obama and from people who'd read the book. That's as fast as I could do it for you there. Okay, that was pretty good. That's pretty fast. I had two follow-ups. One is you didn't mention the key part of your lore, which is that a boy set fire to your hair when you were a child

and you put the fire out with your bare hands? Well, actually, the other little boy next to me put the fire out with his bare hands as I was going, what's happened? He's my head on fire. So, I mean, it's kind of one of those stories was you need friends looking out for you. That guy who did that, Stuart Quambi,

was most recently a steward on British Airways. You can just, you know, kind of be sure that he'd look out for you in an emergency. Really? You've kept touch with him the whole time, the boy that put out the fire? Well, yeah. When somebody saves you from, you know, literally a whole head on fire, you know,

you tend to keep an eye on them. You never know when you might need them. My other question was going into the Trump administration the first time at all. I just was kind of wondering your mindset on that because at some level, I think certain people kind of rationalize what my book was about, like rationalized going in because it's like, hey, we need good people. And if I'm working over in, you know, the Treasury Department, it's better to have a good

person there than a bad person. And, you know, you went in as a Russia expert. And so even at the beginning, you knew that was going to be a hot spot with Trump, given what had happened in the election and going into the election. And so I was just curious what your mindset was on going in the first time. Well, that's definitely a hair-on-fire moment. And, you know, using that metaphor of my friend, my friend, Stu, you know, it's actually, I mean, there was a number of people that I knew that were still, you know, in the government, professional, you know, analyst experts, some people who'd gone in to the National Security Council as well, none of whom were partisan or political. That sort of when I was, when I was approached, first of all, which was by Katie McFarland, and, you know, weirdly General Flynn and also General Kellogg.

I mean, yeah, it's a kind of a... General Flynn approached you? I'd work with him in the previous iterations of General Flynn. Do you keep in touch with him still? I do not, no. He's doing kind of like a Christian nationalist tour through the country. He has completely transformed from the person that I met when I was in the National Intelligence Camps. He was my counterpart in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is Admiral Mullen at the time.

And we were actually working in lockstep of the crisis in Georgia when the Russians invaded Georgia. you know, can we even remember all of these things that have happened, you know, back in August of 2008? And he remembered me as being just a, you know, straightforward, straight shooter. And I kind of was having a hard time, to be honest, reconciling, you know, the person that he kind of had appeared to be during the campaign, but with the person that he was. But there was a lot of people I'd worked with then in the chairman's office and people who worked with him that he brought on board. And they were all, you know, pretty sensible people. So look, I will say that I actually thought national security was going to win out.

If they'd asked me, you know, then, you know, there was probably a chance that they were going to do something serious to try to deal with Russian interference. And, you know, I shouldn't just sit there, you know, basically lobbing criticisms from the, you know, the sidelines. If I really, you know, meant, you know, to try to have some kind of impact, then at least you should at least try. And I did get some really good advice from one of my colleagues at Brookings at the time when my colleagues, Martin Indic, you know, who you will obviously remember as former assistant secretary for the Near East, former ambassador to Israel, who was, you know, my boss for a while at Brookings. And he said to me, look, you know, you can go in and do this as long as you're part of the solution. As soon as you think of being part of the problem, you've got to leave. And, you know, that was kind of, you know, pretty good advice. So I took in a box, you know, that I didn't have a resignation letter already, but I took in a box that I could just throw in. my stuff in and just, you know, leave if things got pretty crazy. And they got crazy fairly fast. That is good advice with one caveat, which is that there's a human nature element to it, which is that a surprising number of people, I think, went in with that intuition and then didn't leave. Yeah. You know, I remember talking to Ryan's previous about this. It was my boss.

And he ends up going to be the chief of staff. And I sent him an email that said, you know, basically that's the important thing you're going to have to do if you go in there is say no. Yeah. You know, you don't have to be able to say no a lot. Yeah. And if he crosses the line, you're going to have to be able to give him a final no. And he kind of nodded his head at me and said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously he didn't, you know, he ends up getting left on the tarmac by Donald Trump with him, insulting him on Twitter, never having stopped anything, right? And so it's tough. You are in there with all these people. You know, you kind of get, you get wrapped up in the team and you get wrapped up in group think. And I don't know, why do you think it was there's so few Fiona's, I guess, is a question. Well, I would say that I wasn't in that team with those guys, you know, rents and people I thought they never really gave me the time of day. And it was really at that kind of, you know, lower working level where, as I said, I did know a lot of the people and some of them I'd work with, you know, in other settings.

And look, I also had a lot of reminders from people, you know, who I respected who, you know, were pretty adamant that I shouldn't do this and they were pretty angry with me for doing it. You know, and I took that on board. It wasn't that I disregarded it and decided not to because I felt at the time that it was an important thing to do. and I'd really thought about it, and I'd talk to a lot of people, and it wasn't that, you know, kind of the people who said I should do it outweigh the others. It's just that, you know, in that particular context of what the Russians had been up to and, you know, the danger of that moment, you know, why then had I bothered to started studying Russian, you know, back in the 1980s, you know, kind of one that was the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

You know, and I'd learned all this stuff about Vladimir Putin, you know, and I just had to think that perhaps I might be able to nudge things, you know, kind of away from the precipice, if not in, you know, kind of a better direction. And of course, you know, the idea that I might sit down with Trump and be able to tell him anything was dispelled on day one. Sure. You know, because the whole idea that Katie McFarland and General Kellogg, you know, had actually laid out to me and not really general Flynn. I mean, to be honest, I had like two phone calls of a couple of minutes each with him, you know, in which he just, you know, it didn't really impart anything of anything. And then he'd

gone before I'd even started. But there I'd, I'd, idea was that I would be able to sit down with Trump and just have a plain, you know, discussion as an ordinary, you know, kind of, you know, person, you know, written a book and done all these different things and just sort of tell him, you know, what Putin was like, but of course he didn't want to hear because his first look at me was like, who are you, you're, you are you, you ordinary person who's done something, well hell do you know? And, you know, and then he actually literally said, and I've got Rex, who's working on Russian, Rex being Rex Tillison, you know, who, you know, obviously didn't get much of a chance to, you know, advise him and impart any

knowledge either, despite having been the CEO of one of the world's greatest in terms of size and, you know, valuation companies. And having done billion-dollar deals with Putin, he didn't really want to know what he had to say either. Yeah. That was during the period, it's important to contextualize that a lot of people, I was pretty skeptical, but a lot of people were like, Trump will get in there and it'll change, right? Like the weight of the office will fall on his shoulders and he'll be serious and I want to hear from people who know more than him. And that didn't turned out to be. For people who don't remember, I do just want to play a little clip from your testimony in that first impeachment and kind of ask you about how some of that is reverberating

still today. So let's listen to some from your testimony. Based on questions and statements I've heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies confirmed in bipartisan congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified. The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today.

Our nation is being torn apart. It is in dispute still, seven years on. So it appears right, yeah, or newly in dispute. Yeah, newly into a current president. And his secretary of state, who was part of the bipartisan group that said at the time that they had interfered. It seems like the success of that operation was like beyond the Russians wildest dreams. And I do wonder how you think all of that, like, kind of reverber. rates today and looks today and how much that they're still engaging it.

Yeah, look, when you think about the Russians and you look at the history of Russian interference and Soviet interference before that, even Imperial Russia, they always succeed when things are moving in the direction that they're already traveling in. You know, you have all these expressions about useful idiots, fellow travelers, you know, they've come down in the law of, you know, Russian interference and public operations. And they really succeed where somebody else wants to do just exactly what is that they want them to do. And, you know, we have a president in Donald Trump who wants to use propaganda himself,

who, you know, has the same interests as Putin and the Russians do, and the Soviets did before about breaking up the Western alliance, about, you know, basically taking America off in a different direction and of, you know, kind of breaking down the United States democracy for his own interests. and it has a very similar worldview of Mike Makes Right and, you know, the strong do, you know, what they must and, you know, what they can and, you know, the weak are always going to suffer. I mean, this is, for Putin and for the Russians, this was just an incredibly fertile ground. Yeah. And, you know, Donald Trump didn't want to rein in any of their nefarious activity because he wanted to conduct the same nefarious activity himself.

But he's doing all of this in parallel. And I think, you know, what became very clear to me as well, you know, during that whole series of tests, is leading up to the impeachment and then the impeachment trial itself. There was, you know, this whole parallel universe that was, you know, there alongside the, you know, seeming formalization and formality of state affairs, U.S. to Russia, in which there was just a whole cast of characters around President Trump and his entourage, we were just doing something entirely different. And you might remember that I actually did say something along, you know, those lines of, you know, domestic political errands, you know, that Gordon Sondland, the former US ambassadors, the European Union

was engaging in, well, no, it's all domestic political errands. And that parallel, you know, set of people, the operators around Trump, they're the people who are in charge. And Marco Rubia is just a fig leaf. He's kind of a, you know, the stand-in for the state. He's running two jobs at the same time as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. But, you know, everything else is just is a crony, a close crony of Trump doing, you know, basically the president's bidding. And so, you know, that's kind of even more so playing in Putin's favor because that's the kind of environment that he loves to operate in. So Putin is the operative in the Kremlin. And all of the United States is operating in a similar way of backdoor deals, you know, business transactions, you know, all kinds of nefarious activities.

and all on compromising information and hardball tactics. And, you know, this is just a world in which Vladimir Putin flourishes. He seems even more successful now than he did before when there were actually constraints and restraints within the U.S. system. Yeah, I want to get back to the Rubio and Witkoff and how they're doing the dealings now. Just a couple of things on the first round. Is your assessment that, like, when Russia started that interference campaign,

was it always with the end goal of wanting Trump to win? or was it of the goal of trying to divide us and kind of Trump ended up being the right vessel for that? I think it's really the latter, but the idea that Trump could win. Obviously, I don't think they'd fully thought that this was going to happen, but they'd be delighted if that was the outcome as they were,

popping champagne cocks and all the rest of it. But their ultimate goal, I think, was just to kind of bring us down to size, just to slow chaos, well, you know, they've really succeeded in that. And just to show everybody else that the US was no better than them or any other country. that just the U.S. was just full of hypocrisy and hubris and that, you know, the United States

need to be brought down to size. And, wow, I mean, you know, game over. Yeah, that's over. That's success, right? Russia could collapse itself. I mean, they're weak in so many other ways, militarily and economically. But getting the American people to just basically accept the Russian frame of America that it is no different than these other countries that just acts in its own interests, that it's corruptible. I mean, it's just a success beyond their wildest dreams. Really, and again, it's not really their success. They're just taking advantage of, you know, our own failings.

And, you know, I remember just a couple of meetings with, when I did get into government, with the Russian ambassador at the time, Ambassador Antonoff, where he just relayed back to me when we do these, you know, equivalents of day marshes about all the things that they'd done in terms of interference. And he'd say things, well, did we invent. that. Did we invent this? Did we do this? Did we do that? It was all about things that Americans had done. And you had to say, well, no, you didn't actually. You can't blame Russia for everything. Yeah, right. They had the long list. He had the ledger. Kind of like Trump has the ledger of all the people

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One of the other thing I was curious to ask you about from that first term is you're there for the Helsinki meeting. One of the big mysteries for me remains that the private Trump and Putin meeting that happened on the side of Helsinki and the limits of the translator and other people not being invited. Do you still at this day have any sense of

what exactly happened there? It's Helsinki, absolutely, because a lot of people have conflated what happened at Helsinki with what happened in one of the first encounters between Trump and Putin at the G20 meeting in this new have a lot of time.

Remember, we all do, right? And I mean, the sequencing of all of this. In Hamburg, where he took the translator's notes. And what you've got to think about is the translators' notes are for themselves in short-hand because they're doing this consecutive translation fast in real time. time. So it's just a kind of their own, you know, memories. But in that meeting, you had Rex Tillerson,

who was taking notes, and Rex Tillerson put his notes in his inside pocket. Trump didn't take his notes. And Rex Tillerson related to the rest of us, you know, what happened. But then there's an episode later where Trump goes to dinner in Hamburg and he doesn't take his own translator. And Melania is sitting, the first lady is sitting next to Putin, of course, Trump makes his way over, can't resist, you know, kind of coming to talk to Putin and then it's all on the Russian translator and, you know, we only know what happened then from what we could get related to us by millennia stuff, which is, you know, there, but it wasn't a very big interaction. It's all, you know, there in cameras, you know, all sort of trying to lip read, you know, looking at the kind of camera

to see what's going on. But at Helsinki, the translator, you know, because we'd already been forewarned is forearmed, you know, made sure that her notes were not taken away. And you've got kind of remember that these translators are all pretty highly skilled. And in the case, the translator at Helsinki, who was now retired, she'd had more meetings with Putin and other, you know, US leaders of different levels, you know, across the government than anybody else. I mean, she knew Putin inside out, the way he talks and everything. And, you know, she sort of basically came out and did a full brief of what had been discussed inside. That's interesting. Those things always create lore because, right, there's this question that kind of hangs over all this, which is like, is it possible that Trump

could just be this pliable and this enamored by Putin and this easily flattered? Or is there something else happening? And right? I do think it's like those meeting things that care. Is there something? Is there another deal happening we don't know about? Yeah, Dan Coates, who was the DNI, the director of national intelligence and former ambassador to Germany, all kinds of things.

I mean, he, that's the way that he put it the whole time. couldn't believe that Trump could be just so pliable, that it had to be something else, you know, because it's just, it seems inconceivable, to quote the Princess Bride, inconceivable, you know, that he could possibly, you know, be in that easily manipulated frame. But I think he's in that easily manipulated frame. And Putin has been trained for his old career in the KGB, you know, to basically manipulate people. He was a recruiter, you know, somebody ran assets. And, you know, he's always looking for people's vulnerabilities. And Trump is particularly susceptible to flattery. And as we all know, if he gets insulted, he goes nuts.

You know, so Putin is always extraordinarily careful, you know, to make sure that in any way that he might mock or make fun of Trump doesn't literally, you know, translate either in his body language or his language, Trump himself. And he frequently insults him, but just in these kind of clever, sneaky kind of way, is that anyone who's in that frame understands, but it doesn't really kind of translate, you know, kind of across the cultural divide or in a way that Trump would see it. And he's just always, you know, seemingly flattering him, nudging him, egging him on. He's hegging him on about Greenland. He's egging him on about this. He's egging him on about that. And he's just extraordinarily good. And I saw him do that in Helsinki at the lunch when he just

basically, deliberately, the very end where I thought, God, we got through that lunch without any you know, a major problem there, he starts to introduce, you know, kind of a question about US domestic politics and a sentence Trump off on a rant about Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden and, you know, anybody who looked like they might be a potential challenger for him in, you know, a future presidential election. So this takes us to kind of the last thing from the first term that bridges us to the news of the day and of the week, which is some of you've been talking about in other interviews recently, which was in, I think, one of those conversations you mentioned with the ambassador to Russia and then just kind of analyzing

other public statements. There was some discussion back then about a kind of Venezuela for Ukraine swap. And I'm wondering how serious you think that was. And if you do think that, you know, there's any element of that at play and what we've seen in Trump's actions over the last month. Well, first of all, it was one of these where they make it clear that, you know, if you bite on this, you know, this could go somewhere. But it was kind of, you know, framed more. in very heavy, obvious hints, you know, framing, you know, discussions of Ukraine in the context of Venezuela and the US interest in this, talking about the Monroe Doctrine, talking about US interest historically in the Western Hemisphere, and then in the same breath, you know, without almost

pausing, talking about their own interests in their own sphere. There were articles in, you know, Russian press, you know, often in English, you know, so that they were intended there, you know, for an audience meetings with, you know, think tankers. I mean, I wouldn't say it was a, full on, full court press, but it was, you know, definitely meant to entice. And again, it would be like these recruiting exercises. If you bite, you know, want to know more, you know, kind of then they'll take it further. Yeah. And so I, you know, was kind of a basically instructed to go and turn it off because of that particular time. Certainly the people who are managing Venezuela. And, you know, this was, remember in that first instance, there was the coalition,

provisional government of one Guaido. I mean, everyone's about him now, Poma. and the whole idea that there would be an effort to try to get Maduro to leave, go to Costa Rica or, you know, God knows where, and, you know, just leave the scene. And Russians, you know, initially, you know, were just observing all of this, but then they got wind or they thought they'd got wind of some effort, you know, perhaps to do something like we've just seen. But anywhere to have an idea of a U.S. invasion that were deeply suspicious, you know, given the United States' propensity in the past, you know, to move into Cuba and, you know, everywhere else. And so they moved in a group of guys, you know, to sell prop the Dero up. And, you know, that's kind of when, you know, also they picked up again on a little bit more of, you know, that's our zone, this is your zone. You know, this could be resolved. And I was supposed to basically go to talk to them with others, of course.

It wasn't just on my own to try to disentangle, you know, Venezuela and Ukraine said they've got nothing to do with each other. But now we have Trump himself making all these kinds of connections. and he's got Greenland in the mix, which did come up the first time around, but not with the Russians at all. Yeah, talk to us about that, how Greenland came out the first time around. Well, Greenland seems to have come up

with him in a discussion with Ron Lauder. Sda Lodder. For a few and rare earths. It's an interesting portfolio. Well, I did have a kind of an insane moment. Is there something in the moss that's a great, you know, for Facebook packs or something, you know, mudbats or, you know, insane,

precious minerals we could use, you know, in cosmetics. You know, I was just, I was, you know, kind of flummoxed. And it was Ambassador Bolton, who's also spoken about it, John Bolton, who, you know, was the person who Trump cornered and basically said he wanted to buy Greenland. You know, how exactly the conversation came up with Ron Lauder, I honestly couldn't tell you. But there was, you know, discussions at the time that China was expressing interests in mineral rights in places like Greenland and Iceland and Swalbad in Norway, which hopefully is not on Trump's agenda, though he seems to have got Greenland and Ireland. Iceland muddled up several times in his speech at Davos, which is worrying for the Icelanders as well. And, you know, then...

He said that Iceland said that he was their daddy. Yeah, that's... I don't think that's right. No, I don't think so. Although, you know, there are small populations in these places and he does have answers. It could have been Vikings. I don't know. I don't think he mentioned that sense.

No, I don't think to maybe have a common daddy, you know, somewhere way back, you know, at the time of Eric the Red or, you know, kind of. Remember the Vikings were the first, actually, not just to get to, you know, kind of all kind of other points, you know, of the world, but also to get to North America. You know, we have, you know, all of these Viking forests. And that's, of course, first Europeans, because we have the Inuit and other First Peoples, you know, elsewhere, you know, keep getting ignored in all of this. You know, Trump basically at that point, just first formulating the idea that he'd like to have Greenland, which, of course, we then went through, you know, in a memo.

And I didn't finish it off because I actually left because I could see that I was about to become part of the problem, not the sleut. getting back to Martin Indyx warning. You know, I left in the July of 2019 before all these other things start to unravel. But when we had a draft of the memo, they just went through, you know, all the kind of history of the United States and Greenland,

the rights of the United States had under the 1951 security treaty, all of the things that people are reading about now, you know, were kind of prefigured there. But, you know, the other point was Greenland wasn't for sale and the Greenlander people, grandkids people are not for sale either. But there was then still that discussion about the possibility of Greenland's independent,

And, you know, these ideas of free association, shared sovereignty, all these kinds of things were all sort of percolating around. So you also came out of this from a security expert, POV. And so just almost taking away, like, the partisan element of this and that stupidity of, like, and the ham-handedness of how Trump is going about it. Is there anything to the argument about value in Greenland for national security purposes? Well, yes, but it's already dealt with NATO and with a security treaty. I mean, the United States itself drew down its forces there in Greenland, you know, from thousands to a couple of hundred.

And one of the reasons that, you know, kind of there was so much interest there was because the United States has really been neglecting it, of potential interest. And even the Icelanders and the Greenlanders, you know, had also been signaling to the U.S. to be more involved. Not like this, but, you know, could they... But what is the worry? I guess I can't even grasp what the concern is. Well, I think that that's the point, because the concern is that maybe somewhere, down the line, Russia or China may want to get hold of Greenland. The Danes turned off any of these, you know, interests by China in acquiring mineral rights, concessions or licences. Same in Svalbard,

the Norwegians did that. Iceland, you know, kind of didn't like the idea of, you know, large numbers of, you know, Chinese appearing to want to build golf courses or invest in ports and things, you know, it became a bit overwhelming. And although, you know, there is always Russian activity in the Arctic, I mean, it's their backyard. Russia is, an Arctic and sub-arctic power. Of course they're there. And World War II, we were really concerned about the Greenland-Ison's UK gap. There's not been any sign of a Chinese ship in the vicinity of Greenland for more than a decade. And also Russia, I hear you on Russia being, you know, in the Arctic, but, you know, they invaded Ukraine four years ago now and have made it like

40 miles. You know, there's a lot of steps between there. They're all the other Baltic and Nordic countries. Yeah, and now we've actually probably making security in the Arctic, you know, even less reliable because, you know, this was already covered by NATO. And the United States, just to be clear, when he talks about the Golden Dome as well, beyond minerals and, you know, of course, there's a lot of business interests in the minerals, of course, but they're also unminable, you know, for, you know, the kind of the near term, because there's no infrastructure there. And the United States, you know, might have concessions or licenses, but they haven't been

actually turned these into, you know, actual mining activities. There are lots of British and Canadian companies there, but some of them have sold out because of the difficulties of actually, you know, by bringing any minds into fruition, they've got all kinds of rules and regulations, ecological environment for good reason, very fragile, you know, ecosystems that are there. But the whole, you know, kind of point there is also from the anti-ballistic missile warning defences. The United States also needs the UK and Norway there. The UK is actually a massive communications hub and has, you know, kind of major radar installations that the United States and the UK operate together and so does no way. So, you know, you kind of alienate everybody else.

Trump always says the US does 100% of NATO or, you know, 80% of NATO, 70% of NATO, but there's pretty critical parts of the contributions of other NATO members that are really going to cause problems for the United States down the law if they were not there. And I mean, that's kind of part of the problem there. The whole security of Greenland, you know, has been in a pretty fine balance with all of these other players. And you've got Iceland, the United Kingdom, Norway, and other Nordic and Scandinavian countries. Now you're just pretty much alienating them all. So we're taping this Wednesday afternoon. Right as we're getting on, we have our first, I don't even know if you want to call it good news because it's so ridiculous. It makes me feel like

my job is so stupid sometimes. But Trump has backed down. It's like all of this, you know, conflagration, all this ridiculousness sort of for nothing, apparently. But here's his post. He wrote this, based on a very productive meeting I've had with Secretary General of NATO, we have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland. The solution, if consummated. Consumated? Yuck. Will be a great one for the United States and all NATO nations. Based on this understanding, it will not be imposing tariffs. Additional discussions are to be held concerning the Golden Dome, blah, blah, blah. Steve Whitkoff's going to be involved.

Whatever this deal is, like could have just been done without menacing all of these people. And I do think that the way he's gone about it is going to create real consequences. But anyway, what's your reaction to that back down? Well, there will be consequences. I mean, I think, you know, what people have been trying to do is find him an off ramp, you know, the whole time to, you know, back off from this. Because this was about and it still is about, and it could come back again, Trump alone.

I mean, he wants Greenland because it's so big. You know, we all talk about the Mercator, Mercator, Mercosur projections. And, you know, with Greenland, I mean, I think, you know, Trump's thinking is that the United States would be the biggest country in the world. Well, you know, if you had in Canada and the United States and Greenland, absolutely, you know, bigger than Russia, et cetera, et cetera. But he's thinking all the time about size. I mean, these ridiculous, you know, pictures of him with Vance and Rubio standing behind him planting a flag on Greenland, members of Congress and, you know, videos apparently cutting up cakes with Greenland on. You know, they've been thinking that this is all funny and that, you know,

they can, you know, do this without any cost. And, you know, because Trump, you know, for him, this is like, you know, basically the ultimate prize, literally, as he said to the Norwegian Prime Minister, if I can't have the Nobel Peace Prize, then I want Greenland. And he says it in his speech in Davis. I want Greenland. I mean, this is so upset. It wants it for his own prestige and aggrandizement.

And yet the United States already has Greenland in the sense of all the things we've talked about in terms of ensuring U.S. security, having access to mineral resources when, you know, if, you know, they are necessary and available, you know, with necessary investment in an infrastructure. And all what he's done here is alienated everybody because it's made Europe feel that not only they're under attack from the eastern flank from Russia, but they're under attack from the north by their greatest friend and ally. And Denmark, as we all know, has been probably out of all those NATO allies, the most dedicated to its relationship with the United States. Most of, you know, the Danish products that Americans buy are actually manufactured, creating American jobs in the United States, exactly what, you know, Trump has asked for, including, you know, as an epic, you know, and all the things that everybody's kind of talking about all the time. They're made in the United States. Denmark has, you know, supported the United States and all kinds of, you know, operations and military operations. And, you know, the Danes and many of the things that they've done in their own policies, the kinds of things that the United States is always talking about, an immigration and security, etc., etc. And now the Danes are so angry with the United States for not constraining, you know, what Trump has been saying, that I'm not sure, you know, how this comes back again.

And he's, you know, basically frightened the bejesers out of the Greenlanders who were basically, saying, look, we're people. We're not for sale here. Do you want to enslave us? I mean, this is, you know, creating a pretty nasty set of reverberations for the United States, you know, here, there, and everywhere. To the everywhere, I think that's what I wanted to play next. Mark Carney's speech over in Davos was pretty noteworthy because the way he was talking about kind of this decoupling, this rupture with the United States. I basically, makes it seem like this is something they're going forward on regard. Like this, this Trump Taco on this doesn't really change at the underlying point of Carney's argument about

the way that the world is changing now. And so I want to play just about a minute of the Carney's speech because I think it's pretty significant. Let's listen to that. An American hegemony in particular help provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs is leverage. Financial infrastructure is coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

That is remarkable. It is remarkable. And, you know, that's kind of a speech if they would have dared. make it, but, you know, a former, you know, vassal states of the Soviet Union or, you know, neighbors of Russia would make if they wanted to. And that's coming from Canada, you know, which along with Denmark, the closest, you know, possible, you know, in the UK as well, of course, you know, closest possible friend and ally of the United States. And 80% of Canadian trade, the bulk of the population, all intertwined with the United States. And Mark Carney is

saying, no, not anymore. And he means it. He obviously means it. He obviously means it. And it also feels like at some level it's repairable, you know, that it just, it means like they're going to make this change no matter what, right? Like we've demonstrated ourselves, we being the United States, to be too unreliable for them to continue in the same framework that they've continued in. And I was listening to your conversation with David from, you know, where you're talking about

how that's true economically, but also militarily. And how you were, you were kind of saying that going forward. forward, you'll see surprising kind of countries start to build up militarily because they feel like they have to. I think you'd mentioned Finland and Turkey and some others. So how do you see all of that playing out in the next little bit? Yeah, I see a real tragedy here for the United States. You know, Trump and others are absolutely right that NATO basically was too much and dependent on the United States, was being carried by the United States. No question about it. And it was Barack Obama, you know, in 2014, who insisted on the two percent of, you know,

GDP spending, not Trump, but, you know, nobody did anything really in that interim. And even before that, you know, we go back to Kennedy Johnson, you know, you name it past presidents going back to the 60s. There was a whole debate about, you know, Europe needing to do more. As Europe recovered from World War II, it needed to step up in terms of its commitments to its own defense. And, you know, they've been wanting in that. But the United States has also prospered, you know, that so-called arsenal of democracy that was, you know, kind of built up in the Midwest and elsewhere. built up more recently by the North of Grumman's, Lockheed Martens, and Darylls and, you know, all the kind of newer companies,

Palantir, you know, you name them, by selling products, services as well as, you know, military equipment and state-to-the-art technology to, you've got it, other NATO members. And now other NATO members are thinking, wow, okay, you know, we also depend on you, they're going to start leveraging this. And, you know, yes, we need, you know, to build up our military, but maybe we don't want to be buying America.

And there's already been a backlash. I was just in the UK, you know, a week ago, you know, a lot of questions about why did we make all these agreements with the United States? I mean, yes, we need, you know, this bridge to, you know, get, you know, more weaponry from the United States to build things up. But they're using it as leverage, as Connie is sitting here. You know, they're bullying us. You know, you've got, you know, basically Elon Musk who wants to sell more Stalin and all these other,

people interfering in UK and other European politics, trying to support, you know, subversive populists, many of whom, frankly, a child molesters and, you know, all kind of, honestly, and, you know, other, you know, kind of rapists, you know, the Tate brothers, Tommy Robinson, you know, people who are so far off, you know, the right that they're, you know, off the abyss. And they're actively doing this.

And you're kind of thinking to yourself, you know, if you're all sitting in some of these places, is this what I want? you know and and you know do we want our own you know kind of governments to be basically the now the vassal states of populist white supremacist politics in the united states we don't think so so when you're getting a lot of people starting to really say what is it here that we're dealing with i mean i'm channeling here things that i've been hearing i mean i didn't hear a single person say anything positive about what was happening in the united states in my recent trip to the uk you know a place that's normally pretty supportive and i'm not saying that this is in london i mean i'm in the you know the area where, you know, people are fed up themselves. Yeah, I mean, UK has some problems of their own. Exactly. But they have such a positive view of the United States, and it's, you know, so soured now

and this desire to, you know, basically get away from these dependencies. And, you know, what we do have to worry about is nuclear proliferation. Because, you know, everybody knows that in the past, you know, we've had South Korea, not just South Africa, Turkey, you know, other countries, Japan, you know,

all kind of question is Sweden. Sweden. And think about Sweden, who've all thought, about, you know, getting nuclear weapons. And as I said, you've got all these countries now thinking about, well, you know, maybe we should have a European nuclear weapon. And it's not just the, you know, the British system that seems too dependent on the US or the French that's just for the French. You know, how do we, you know, kind of basically create all kinds of systems so we reduce our dependencies on the United States, which is reduce their ability to leverage

us, you know, by access to the U.S. market or just to kind of bully us and try to ruin our economies. That's rational that they're looking in Delaware. of that. And on the economic side, it's like, look, there will be pain in the short term. And obviously, the economy is not great right now in UK and some of these other places. But the idea that Australia, Canada, Western Europe, UK couldn't bound together and, you know, do a lot of what we're talking about when we're talking about China, you know, over the past 10 years. Like to decouple, right? Like, do things to get themselves out of being, having to rely upon us. That feels rational. And it feels rational because as you say, like, I don't think, you know, in the first term, they could look at this and say this was an outlier, you know, the Americans did something crazy and that'll happen. But, you know, now you look at Trump, and it's like the person that comes after Trump, is that, are they going to be any different? Are they going to be, you know, are using the same tactics?

Well, also, if it's, you know, J.D. Vance to be frank, and he's supported by the tech bros, people are really kind of, I mean, that was part of the discussion at Davos, you know, in other settings. Do people really, you know, there were 8 billion people on the planet. And there are eight, you know, kind of tech bros. Probably that's a bit of a, I'm just using that as a kind of, you know, reference point here. But, you know, this is, I mean, should everybody be enthralled to them? Could they only buy their products and then, you know, have to be, you know, basically manipulated by them and bullied, you know, kind of. And J.D. Vance is supported by them. I've heard that over and over again, you know, kind of what's, you know, with all these.

And again, you know, kind of, you know, from the same kind of background. What are they trying to do here? Yeah. And again, like, Cheedy Vance won't have some of the same, like, megalomania narcissism issues that Trump has and like maybe slightly less erratic. But on a lot of their issues, these countries, he's more extreme. He's more isolationist. He's less willing to deal. That's how many described it exactly right. Because they say, well, he's the real deal. He's very clever. You know, he's very disciplined. But, you know, he seems to be, you know, very much wanting

to kind of make everywhere else in, you know, the US populist, you know, a nationalist, nativist image. And look, this is again, I'm saying this not from a political perspective, just telling you what people are saying. Sure. It's more complicated in Europe than it appears from the United States. I mean, you might think, I mean, you don't think this, but they might think that all of the problems are the same. But, you know, Europe has got an European country's individual

are very complicated histories. And, you know, the United Kingdom, for example, isn't a nation state, it's a state of nations. And they seem to have missed that there are already, you know, kind of recognized, you know, peoples of the British Isles, Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and travelers and all kinds of other people, they don't have this, you know, singular identity that they're trying to push for, you know, for example. There's one other element. I don't know if you've been following this. And I haven't been following

as closely as I should. So it's okay if you're in the same boat because it's hard, you know, with the Trump, you're still trying, you're always trying to navigate. Like, is this a real thing that he's doing? Is this a work? Is it a scam? Is it just some post? And I'm feeling that way about this Board of Peace, you've been following this, the Gaza Board of Peace that he's creating. And it was alarming to me when it was just related to the rebuilding of Gaza. But like over the past week or two, it seemed like the remit for this has expanded quite a bit. He said he invited Putin to be on. Lukashenko has said that he would be on.

I'm like the name leader of Kazakhstan. I'd see these other countries that are in the Putin orbit. This is relevant to our previous conversation about what is rational for Canada and Europe. and others should do, because it feels like he's trying to put together a counterweight group that the US is also part of with his authoritarian buddies. I don't know, maybe that's overreacting. I don't know. What do you think? Well, also a cash payment scheme. I mean, where's this cash going? I mean, I was reading, you know, something that, I mean, I try to read the charter, but then there's this idea, you know, pay what, a billion in cash? Or, I mean, is this a joke? And where does it go?

Does it get invested in Donald Trump meme coins or in cryptocurrency? Because, I mean, I heard recently from a colleague, you know, who looks into these things at North Korea, you know, has made a mint, you know, from basically siphoning off cryptocurrency, you know, so is it going off to North Korea or Kim Jong-un going to be investing it in hair products or, you know, all kinds of other kinds of things, whatever that man does, you know, with his money or, you know, nuclear, nuclear weapons. I don't even know whether to make jokes about it or, you know, to just lament yet again, you know, again, the destruction of anything that could be sensibly approached as a basis for reinvigorating the international system. This is not, I think, what anybody,

you know, might have had in mind. It just seems like another Donald Trump enriched myself quickly scheme. And because the Greenland stuff, the Venezuela stuff, that came up in the first term. This is, I don't, I don't remember kind of a Legion of Doom style plot in the first term, but that's it's becoming more and more like we're in the Marvel universe, you know, it's kind of Marvel economics. I mean, it's, but so many people are making fun of this, memes going around, you know, the internet. I think, you know, the collective wisdom of the internet seems to have got this a little bit more than, you know, foreign policy, no, the around this. This is just a bloody joke. Speaking of bloody jokes, I want to close where we started with Ukraine and get back to present day situation there and the negotiations.

You referenced how there are these things that come down through Russian history about how they, you know, how they do their operations, One such thing is the useful idiot. And we do seem to have a candidate for that in Steve Wittkoff, who has been the point man for the negotiations in Ukraine and Russia. And I'm just wondering how you read what's been happening there and what his role is and how they manipulate him and how maybe that compares to the kind of dealings you saw in the first administration. I think it seems to compare, you know, quite well with what we saw in the, you know, the previous administration when I had Rudy Giuliani and all kinds of people running off, you know, all other players doing all kinds of things. I mean, they're not wrong in that, you know, there were a lot of limitations of the old style diplomacy. Having a pattern breaker in the form of Trump could be pretty useful thinking outside the box. A pattern breaker?

Yeah. Okay, sorry, I got confused. I thought you said patent breaker. And I was like, I got a lot as well. that, yes. A pattern breaker, right? So the old style of diplomacy with Russia wasn't working. You know, we tried all these kind of stale methods.

And kind of, you know, trying to sort of, you know, be inventive about this, not the conventional wisdom. Sure. You know, he addressed a lot of the problems that you could see there. But, you know, the way that Russians operate and that Putin operates, I mean, he is very, very good at just being extraordinary patient. And figuring out all kinds of angles, the manipulation of people. you know, they needed to have some insight into this. I mean, you should not go into a meeting with Vladimir Putin without someone taking notes, without taking note of what he's doing,

what he's saying, and why he's saying it, without your own interpreter and without any kind of preparation. I mean, even if you want to have a fresh set of ideas and a fresh thinking about this, because you're just laying yourself up and to be manipulated. So they just have a Russian interpreter? Yeah, a lot of these meetings he was just going in, you know, with the Russians interpreter.

and God knows what he thought he was hearing. And I think, you know, from what I've heard, the Russians were pretty frustrated by this as well. Why? It feels like they're getting everything they want. Yes, but they didn't get any follow-up. I mean, you might get everything you want in the moment of, you know, somebody, you know, buying your whole stick, basically. But then what happens when he comes home and then can't remember exactly what they've said or gets it all confused, which seems to be, you know, the pattern in some cases. And then nothing happens because these things are not implementable. and you've got this kind of ridiculous

you know you go to talk to Putin here and then you talk to somebody else here and then you go over and have to talk to Zdeninsky here and then everybody else over there there's not a coordination of there's no there in the process and people would complain about that the first time around people like Erdogan for example I remember this is you know the president of Turkey

he would talk to Trump about his bad advisors because his guys would have discussions with the advisors who try to take things back to Trump Trump and Trump would just ignore it. Or Trump, he would ambush Trump with a phone call, you know, while he was on the golf course. Of course, Trump's got no one with him. But Erdogan's got a whole phalanx of people all around him taking careful note and

wanting to have follow up. And as I mentioned, you'd have the ambassador of Russia would come in with this long sheet of things that he wanted to follow up on. I'd say, well, I don't know. I mean, was this discussed, you know, with President Trump? Because Trump doesn't tell anybody, you know, kind of about his conversations. I feel like we're in Groundhog Day with the Ukraine and Russia situation, right? Where we're just going to go through the same cycle over and over again of Trump playing

footsie with Putin and getting mad and getting pulled back in and then doing it again. Do you see any off ramp? And it's such a tragic situation we're in right now. And the Russian casualties are off the charts. Ukraine, it's the worst winter of the war. Regular Ukrainians are freezing or dying and like living in tents. I don't like what would you if Zelensky called you like what would you even say at this point could be a possible off ramp for this situation or is there just not one I'm incredibly sorry you know and this is shameful about you know the US position here but you know many people have been saying to the Ukrainians all along that you've got to really you know work with the Europeans at this point I mean the problem is of course as everybody's going to immediately identify is it you know the the US uh military equipment is still necessary, you know, for Ukraine.

Europeans are purchasing that now, but, you know, the U.S. has still got kind of leverage there and in terms of arm sale. And the Ukrainians have been incredibly innovative and, you know, have really been pulling out all the stops themselves, you know, but ultimately the United States has really let them down. And, you know, if the war is lost, I think that's on the U.S. It's certainly not on, and also on Europeans, you know, kind of. for not acting quick enough and, you know, not from, you know, building up,

because it's not being for the one to the Ukrainians, you know, fighting back to, you know, really defend themselves. I mean, again, it's remarkable, you know, where we are in this conflict. You know, you itself have said that, you know, despite the fact it seems that the, you know, the Russians have made huge progress, you know, they really haven't in the larger scheme of things. It's supposed to be a small special military operation, a small in duration. and it's now gone on longer than the Soviet Union was fighting Nazi Germany in World War II

with colossal casualties, as you've said, on the Russian side, not just on the Ukrainian side. It'd be like if we invaded Mexico four years ago and had gotten to Cancun, you know, it's like not that great. You would think we could do better. Well, that's actually reasonably far because you know what's going on. I don't know, it depends on where we started, you know, exactly. But anyway, it's just it's, I mean, the problem here is that this could have gone in a different direction of there being a unified approach to this. But, you know, Trump has been desperately trying to get rid of it all the time. He wanted to have his own separate relationship with Putin.

He's never wanted anything, you know, to do with this. You know, he's wanted to sit down with Putin to do arms control agreements, all kinds of things. And the tragedy of all of this is he's probably made the world even more insecure than it was before. In retrospect, realpolitik, should he have just done the drug deal? Should Zelensky have just given him shit on Hunter Biden? Now that we know what we are. He didn't really have any. I mean, that was the whole thing.

That was also a fabrication. But that's kind of what Trump blames him for. You know, he blames him for the phone call that it was Trump's phone call, you know, basically. Personally, I mean, I'd never thought they should have had that phone call, and I left recommending there was no phone call scheduled. I had no idea that that was how it was going to go, but I didn't think it was going to be a good phone call anyway

because Trump was so antagonistic towards Zelensky and the Ukrainians, and he remains antagonistic towards them. What a rough world we're in, Fiona Hill. But I do think, though, just to be very clear here, and you are called the Bullwark. Yeah, please. We are the ballwark. There is the ability to do things.

Let's do it. We had Sarah McBride left us with an uplift at the end. why don't you give us a little speech too? We could use it. I think Mark Carney's laid it out there. I mean, he's basically telling everybody, time to rally, time to get real, you know, time to do something. And, you know, here's a ways forward. You know, there's all kinds of ways in which people are stepping up right now to just say, look, you know, we need to do something different. We do need members of Congress to get the act together.

And on the Republican side, absolutely. You know, it can't just be, you know, people on the streets of Minnesota or, you know, anybody else, you know, trying to just say this is wrong. I mean, we have to, you know, use every platform, as Mark Carney has just done, you know, that we possibly can have in Davos, but we have to actually take some action. And I think, you know, at the state level, mayors, governors, you know, anybody who can now as a platform and an ability to act, so they've got to do that. Because I personally think America is better than this. You know, I came here in 1989 as the, I was literally, you know, in my first month in the United States, the building wall came down my first couple of months. And I still think that that ability to do things better is there. And it's certainly here in America. But it's not there if we all are in trial to one guy who's clearly lost the plot.

Amen to that. Fiona Hill, thank you so much for the time today. I appreciate you very much. And let's stay in touch, all right? Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you. Everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See you all then.

Peace. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.