The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 7: Fiona Hill: Working with Trump and fighting against Putin

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

From a coal-miner's daughter to the White House. Fiona Hill became a leading foreign policy advisor to three presidents, a United States National Security Council official, and a key witness in Donald Trump's 2019 impeachment hearings. In this fascinating interview for Leading, Hill talks about her upbringing in Bishop Auckland, the future of the Ukraine conflict, and what it was really like working under Trump… Read There Is Nothing For You Here by Fiona Hill now: https://coles-books.co.uk/there-is-nothing-for-you-here-by-fiona-hill Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive a weekly newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restis politics.com. Welcome to the restless politics leading. And today we are going to be interviewing Fiona Hill. Fiona Hill is a phenomenon in the United States and should be much better known in Britain. Because she is the leading Russian expert. She's been critical to different administrations, including quite controversially to the Trump administration, but also played a big part in her testimony to exposing the horrors of the Trump administration. And one of the reasons she's interesting is that she's absolutely British and has a very, very interesting British backstory, Alistair. Well, she's British, but she's now an American citizen. I guess partly through she lives there now, she's married, raising a family there, and as you say, as advised successive presidents. And we interviewed her. She was in the States. I was in Switzerland. You were in Jordan.

But Fiona and I were driving down through France listening to her book. And a lot of it is about class, actually. It's about how she grew up in a very, very poor family. Her dad was a minor who became a hospital porter. Her mother worked in the National Health Service. And the title of the book is there's nothing for you here, which is sort of something her dad said to her about, you're going to have to go and make your life somewhere else.

She went to university, studied Russian, St. Andrews University, became a policy advisors, work for all sorts of different institutes and institutions, and as you say, became a critical figure in terms of American foreign policy. So really, really nice to talk to her. And here it is, here's our leading interview with Fiona Hill. So welcome to another episode of Leading with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And we're delighted to have Fiona Hill. Fiona story is really is quite incredible. I've just... driven through France on route Switzerland, listening to her book, there's nothing for you here at double speed.

And it takes the reader, and it takes Fiona, from a pretty impoverished childhood in Bishop Auckland, son of a minor and of a nurse, to the absolute pinnacle of foreign policy, really, not alas in the UK. but in the United States of America. And Fiona, despite still having a bishop orclad accent, is a real big cheese in the foreign policy establishment and an expert on Russia, which is why what she has to say is a particular interest at the moment,

but also somebody who's had first-hand experience of three American presidencies, Trump, most notably, and has been in the room, not just with Trump, but also with Vladimir Putin, not least in relation to events that we're all talking about at the moment. So Fiona, welcome, first of all.

But I guess as a first question, I just think you just tell us that story, very you say in your own book from Cole House to Wirehouse. I mean, it has been a truly remarkable journey. Just give us that story. No, well, thank you very much, Alastair and Rory. It's a real pleasure to be with you.

And I've got this image of my head of you flashing by all kinds of hedgeros and fronts with me on double speed, which is, you know, coming from the North East, of England, of course. That's kind of our normal pace. And I was telling you as we started that the American director for the audiobooks said, slow down, slow down. It's like you're off to the races, which I always feel like, actually. The, you know, the story of the coal house is really kind of the story of County Durham, you know, where I was born in 1965. You know, as I explained in

the book, my dad was no longer a coal miner when I came along, but his whole childhood, his whole youth, and his entire family was shaped by that. He's multi-generations down the mines, left school at 14 to go down the mine. All the mines are closing, you know, by the 1960s, that kind of brief period of what miners of County Durham called a golden era between nationalization at the end of World War II.

And then the 1960s is receding pretty fast in the rearview mirror. And, you know, pretty much this is a period of massive decline around the whole of the northeast. In fact, many other places in Britain in the same period. I mean, you all know the history. You've lived it as well, and I'm sure many people listening to this know it very well. And I benefited, I have to say,

and this is another feature of the book, from really the expansion of education that takes place from the 1960s onwards. I mean, Dad didn't get to take the 11 plus. He just missed it entirely 14 down the coal mines. My mom took it and missed a place to go to grammar school. when she was the same sort of age group, she went on to be a midwife and trained to be a nurse.

And my dad and mum met at the local hospital, after the National Health Service obviously emerged, it became one of the dominant employers in places like Bishop Auckland and many other parts of Britain. But everybody I knew, one way or another, worked in a nationalised industry, either the NHS where a dad ended up as a porter and mum was a nurse,

or in the coal mines, British coal, British steel, British rail, British shipyards, you know, on and on and on. I didn't really know anybody who was an entrepreneur or had their own business beyond maybe a small plumbing business or a corner shop. So when I was trying to, you know, think about, you know, what I could do with myself, you know, I honestly wasn't really very sure. And as I said, benefited from education. There was all kinds of opportunities, my parents and everybody else in the family said, if you've got education opportunity, you've got to take it. And at one point, when I was, you know, around the time doing my O levels, my local MP,

at the time. Derek Foster. Yeah, Lord Derek Foster, who later becomes Chief Whipp of the Labour Party. And sadly died not long ago. He did, and he's really a remarkable man with a remarkable story of his own,

real deprivation and hardship. And he'd had his life turned around. He'd gone and Docsbridge and studied PPE was really dedicated to education and basically told kids like me in our school, there's nothing to hold you back. You've got this chance in education,

but education's a privilege. You've got to figure out how to use it. I'll just jump in No, Fiona, because I'll tell you why, because I was really touched by what you said about Derek in the book. Derek, who obviously I knew well because he was Tony Blair's Chief Whip in after the 97 election. And Rory and I, we often talk about most MPs just get slagged off the whole time. But actually, there's an awful lot of good MPs. And what was brilliant about the way you told the story about Derek,

he didn't just meet you and say you should go for it. He kind of, he kept tabs on you and he kept in touch with you, and he was obviously pushing you because he saw something that was in you that he felt had to be developed. Yeah, and not just me, actually. You know, he had his constituents office in the town check up with, you know, anybody who seemed to express interest. I mean, he wasn't just forcing himself on people. But, you know, if you showed an interest and he got to know your family,

he would follow up. And I just thought that was the epitome, really, of being a good MP, as you say, really taking an interest in your constituents. And although education wasn't actually his portfolio at the time, he had been a local leader in education in Sunderland, you know, kind of quite a pioneer for education in the north. northeast. And that was really critical because the whole story about how I got from there to here, and as I say, the Coal House, which is really the whole story of my father's family, to the White House

is one of educational opportunity. And the fact of coming along at the right time, because unlike, you know, most kids today, the local education authority Durham County Council paid for my education once I got a place at University in St. Andrews in 1984. And after that, you know, I got all kinds of grants and subsidies and, you know, small gifts. And I also had people. in the local community help me out. So the story of how I did what I did is really thanks to an awful lot of other people with interventions. But also that whole idea from Derek Foster that if you get an education, it's actually a privilege and you should do something with it, which, you know, I think has kind of disappeared since really that 1980s, that sense that education is a benefit to the

whole of society, not just to individuals. I always had that sense that, you know, particularly as I've been paid for my education, that I needed to do something that would have an impact with that education. even if right from the very bat deciding to study Russian and history might not have been the obvious pathway to a job that would have had larger benefit to society. I mean, you're obviously very, very politically driven and politically motivated. Did you ever consider being a politician?

I mean, you seem to speak very passionately. I can almost imagine you as a Labour MP. Why did you not go down that route? Well, I have to say that I developed an earlier version to parties on politics and to organise political parties, no offence to either of you, who have both been, you know, kind of in the mix here. But it was really kind of growing up against that backdrop of political strife.

Because you think about, you know, we're now in Britain thinking again about the winter of discontent with all the public strike action. And my whole childhood and teenage years and early, you know, period of going to university is basically marred by that great upsearch of industrial action and political fighting. at the end of the 1970s, and also I went to University Against the backdrop of the Minor Strike, 1984, 1984, 1985. And my sense at the time was that people were so busy fighting and so many egos on the line, you know, that actually Derek Foster was rare rather than really the kind of like standard of, unfortunately, people involved in politics.

And I, you know, kept thinking, well, I don't think this is for me. I don't want to pander to special interests and I don't want to be, you know, in these ideological fights. I mean, I guess if anything, my ideology bends on the pragmatic, you know, the kinds of things that you can see that actually have, they make a difference to people. And, you know, I've found too much, I mean, even, you know, with sitting around with family members and my dad, you know, kind of when he was already in the NHS, you know, with the unions and all of the strike action. And people, you know, really personalising a lot of this as well. It didn't seem that that was a particularly productive avenue, although I could see it firsthand an example of really good local politics and, you know, somebody who really cared when he got to the level of Westminster. All but seemed to be off in terms of having a positive impact.

It's interesting, though, because you ended up working with perhaps the most populist, divisive, polarising post-truth politician that the world has yet seen, and we'll come on to that. So you have to have politicians, but you also have to have people in public service like you. But the book behind you, the book you wrote, is called There's Nothing for You Here. And that's something that your dad, Alv said to you. and that in a way is what led you to

leave the UK and end up in America. Yeah, and I mean, it's also led me eventually to write the book because, you know, people shouldn't be telling, you know, people that there's nothing for you here and, you know, the place where you grew up. And part of, you know, the problem that I've contributed to is Brendrin, you know, not just from the northeast of England, but from also the UK writ large.

And of course, you know, we have all these stories of refugees and migrants, you know, from all kinds of places, similar stories to mine. But it was extraordinarily common, you know, for people. I've had letters, hundreds of letters since I wrote the book, the people saying, yeah, my dad said the same to me, or my grandma said the same thing to me that was nothing for them here in the same kind of environment.

You know, over, you know, a good series of decades, both before and after me, I mean, in 1984, when I left university, there was a 90% youth unemployment raised in the United Kingdom. It didn't mean that people didn't eventually got jobs, because, of course, they did. But it was just that whole atmosphere of kind of a lack of hope, a kind of a feeling of sort of collective despair at the time that, you know, you wouldn't find your path. Although I did have friends who went on to really good apprenticeships and, you know, extremely good jobs in engineering.

One friend, you know, Rolls Royce, for example. There are people who did get places, not just at, you know, university. I went to St. Andrews, but at what was then Polytechnics, which are now university, some vocational training. But it took them a long time. What my dad was really saying to me was if I wanted to, you know, break into international relations and obviously, of the things that I was interested in, I obviously wasn't going to get job in the north of England. And he was worried overall that I wouldn't get a job, period, because he himself, after the mines closed down, went to a brickworks, a steelworks. He wasn't happy in his job in the NHS, and he was at the law strung of the economic ladder, barely scraping by. And he just felt that there just wasn't the opportunity. And he kept talking about if he'd had

the wherewith all earlier, and I'd talk about that in the book, he would have emigrated. And many relatives went to Australia, New Zealand, Canada. And my dad had actually flirted with the idea of going to work in coal mines in Pennsylvania, of all places, you know, when the mines first closed down in the 60s. Okay. So, Fiona, jumping forward a long time to 2023, and you went off to the United States, you studied Russian history at Harvard, you went on to join the National Security Council in US, you became a US citizen, you advised President Trump, and you became the foremost expert

on Russia and Ukraine. So let's just jump forward to that. What is the moment we're in? What's going on with Russia and Ukraine? Well, it's actually, I mean, an incredible tragedy, of course, which we can see. But it's a tragedy because really what we're doing is having a war of succession from the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, in fact, it's taking us all the way back to that period of 1991 when Russia emerged as the successor state of the Soviet Union. And basically in the mind of Vladimir Putin, who, you know, at that time, obviously was somebody who was extraordinary obscure.

None of us would ever have anticipated, including himself that he would have ended up at the penitimate. of Russian power for 23 years, but a lot of people like him and others could not really ultimately accept that the Soviet Union had gone away. And I don't mean by that communism, central planning and all of the things that we kind of associate with the Soviet Union itself, but the idea of the loss of the state. And Russia was acknowledged as the success of state, as I just mentioned there. And as a result of that, it's almost as if we didn't really think about Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc. All of the other states that come out of the Soviet Union is anything more than really, as they would put it, actually, some of the leaders

have said that to me in the past, shadows of Russia. Because we acknowledged Russia as the inheritor of everything from the Soviet Union, including the nuclear arsenal, all of the debt, as well as all of the seats on the United Nations, etc. And really, as a result of all of this, Putin is basically of that mindset, that it's up to him, as he's. his legacy after being 23 years in power as president to bring a lot of that territory back again. I mean, that's basically in a nutshell. So we're in a way of fighting over issues that we might have seen at the very beginning

of the 1990s, but have been, in some respects, pushed off until now. So final question for me, and then I'll hand back to Alistair. We seem to be in a moment of extreme escalation. We're talking to you just after Zelensky has just visited the British Parliament. And having been provided with tanks, he's now asking for fighter jets. There's increasing pressure, it seems, almost every week to demand more and more impressive high-tech machinery from Europe and the United States to support him. Where does this end?

What's your view on this escalation? Well, look, it's a really good question here. And remember again that the escalation is coming from Russia, first of all, because it's Russia that continues to pursue this war. And what we're seeing for Ukraine is it's in a very similar position to Britain in the from 1939 to 1941, when Britain and Winston Churchill were constantly asking the United States for support in trying to basically fend off Germany. And Germany, of course, was the revanchist, revisionist power of the period. So we have to actually think, first of all, about the structural

conditions of this war, which is the third great power conflict over territory, trying to annex and expand territory in Europe after World War I and World War II, whether we want to think about it as World War III or not. And that's the kind of nature of the issue that we're faced with. Do we want to support Ukraine in fending off Russia and restoring its independence, territorial, integrity, and sovereignty? Which was the same kind of question for Europe after the various invasions by Germany in World War I and World War II. It's very similar to what happened to Finland in 1941 when the Finns were invaded by the Soviet Union, having got their independence just 20 years earlier after the collapse. of the Russian Empire, and the Finns actually had to fight the Russians off on all their own.

Now, they're lost, but they gained their independence, if that makes sense. They lost that winter war of 1941. They lost huge squares of territory in Karelia, but they gained their independence. And this is basically what this is. This is a rerun on a huge scale of the Finnish winter war, because Putin is saying it's a successor state to the Soviet Union, it has the right to take this territory back again. And so when you think about it in that terms, I think that that, you know,

kind of in part, question is how far can we allow this to go in many respects because of the implications of this for what we've had in Europe since World War II and since the Cold War? Fiona, how much has Putin changed, do you think, from the Putin that we saw when he first became president, when, as Marina Litvinenko criticized me recently, she felt we were a bit too naive about him. Was he always the Putin that he is now, or has he, do you think, fundamentally changed over those two decades? Well, the circumstances have changed. I mean, first of all, he's been in power for 23 years,

as opposed to, you know, when you were first encountering when he was really at the kind of at the beginning of his presidency. He is, of course, someone who is a product of the KGBs. That gives him, you know, a certain set of tools and mindsets. He's a product of the Soviet Union, and as I'm saying here, of a kind of a mindset that all of this territory and anybody who speaks Russian ought to be part of a kind of a larger Russian state. So that really hasn't changed. But opportunities have changed in his position. perspective. And also, what's changed is he's now coming toward the end, one might anticipate, of his terms in office. I mean, he's got the right, and we'll see whether, you know, actually exercises this or not to run for office again two more times. There's an election coming up in 2024. Of course, he could declare martial law, so he could stay with us until 2036. But he's in

that mindset now of thinking about his legacy. And he has decided, and this is what seems different from before, that his legacy is going to be territorial acquisition. He's literally said, this is an imperial war of conquest. People had better get used to the fact that Russia's borders are moving again. And this is quite different from, of course, the Putin that we might have thought of 10, 12, 15 years ago when the goal was to make Russia one of the great powers financially and economically of Europe. I mean, we've all forgotten this now probably, but there was a push at one time when Russia was within the G7, the G8, to have Russia was like the fifth or sixth largest economic power. And that changed really with the whole

financial crisis of 2008, 2009, the rise of China. And so I think circumstances have changed. And as a result of that, his outlook has shifted somewhat. And he also, look, let's be frank, he thought he could get away with this a year ago. He didn't think that he was going to be creating the third, you know, largest war in Europe in several generations or in this century. He thought he was doing a special military operation. Ukraine would crumble and we would all do very little in response. And Fiona, how do you think this ends? Where do you? think this is going to be in two years time? You know, this is just the toughest question because, you know, people want to have a satisfying end. They want to, you know, have some event, like sitting

on an aircraft carrier like we saw in World War II and signing, you know, some peace treaty. Or look, we've got the anniversary now of Yelta, the Alta conferences of 1945, that was in February. You know, they want to see something that actually resolves something, you know, once and for all. But one could argue that Yelter and Potsdam and the World War II conference didn't resolve anything either because, you know, they created these divisions in Europe, which were then contested over a period of time with the Cold War. I mean, I suspect that what we will see is a process, a different phase. We may have to accept Russia de facto control of still large swathes of Ukrainian territory, but can then we put in mechanisms and institutional arrangements in place that will prevent Russia from consolidating that control over the longer term. But is that, is that? It's not satisfying. I'm a phrase. is what I'm saying, is that there is not a satisfying ending that I see here unless there was some

dramatic series of events. But looking at Zelensky and what he's saying for the Ukrainians now, that feels impossible. Is there a substantial strand of opinion within American foreign policymaking at the moment that actually believes that is the only way this is going to end? There has to be some kind of agreement, some kind of arrangement that brings it to an end and accepts that Putin gets something out of this? Well, I think there is certainly a lot of a discontory. at the moment about exactly that. But I don't know whether it ends up accepting that Putin gets something permanent out of this.

Because, I mean, there are ways, and if we look back over history, of creating international territorial arrangements. I mean, you think at the end of World War I wasn't, again, very satisfactory, was it? The mandate system, the League of Nations. Britain had the mandate over Palestine, you know, for example. We have another where Britain has been heavily involved in Cyprus

in terms of demarcation and patrolling of the UN, the Green Zone, and the divided island. We have the DMZ in Korea. All of these kinds of things have been, you know, floated out there. But none of them necessarily involved the recognition, dejure recognition of what Putin wants, which is the control of Crimea, Donbass,

and now also Herzl and Zaporizia. I mean, what I foresee is a messy continuation of disputes, debates and discussions about, you know, where this is all headed over a longer time. But we have many examples of this around the world. That's why it's also extraordinarily important about being very careful how we handle it. Because if we actually accept the precedent of the change of borders by force and annexation of territory, and Putin would argue, of course, we've already had that with Yugoslavia,

changed the borders by force recognition of Kosovo, though it wasn't annexed by Albania, let's just kind of make sure that's clear. And of course, intervention by Turkey and Cyprus in 1974. But if we have basically said, no, that was an aberration, not the norm. And so we have a big diplomatic problem ahead of us of how to ensure that Putin does not succeed in basically seizing this territory. Because, I mean, here we are, we're then pulling back into that debate of 1945 about spheres of influence. Putin is, of course, of the view also that the United States is still an occupying power in Europe. And, you know, we keep failing to recognize that that's part of the narrative from Russia that the United States should be pulling out of Europe.

Fianna, one of the things that obviously worries people, particularly where I live in the Middle East, is a fear that as we escalate and provide more high-powered armaments, the chances of Putin escalating in return increases that he's going to mobilize more and more troops, that he's going to have more and more of his ego or his face connected to this. And he's going to be driven into more and more extreme measures, particularly because he'll be under pressure not so much from the liberal left, but from an enraged nationalist rights in Russia that feels that Russia is being humiliated. And therefore, many people in the Middle East are worried that this is going to get more and more dangerous. You know, and I think in the Middle East, they've obviously got a pretty realistic assessment of a situation. Others that I've talked to, you know, an analyst in the Middle East and people from the region have said this looks like the Iran-Iraq War, something that, you know, grinds on for a

decade, creating all kinds of chaos and knock-on effects, you know, for a broader region. I mean, I can say exactly why there is this kind of. concern in the Middle East. And we've also heard similar concerns expressed in the last several days by the UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez, worrying that that's exactly where we're heading if we're just focusing on putting equipment into the wall more and more armaments, which, of course, the Middle East knows only too well from their past wars. Basically, what we really need to see here, and I think that this speaks to what your concerns that are expressing here, Rory, is an equal measure of diplomatic effort

because we do have to basically try to get Russia push towards a negotiating table and obviously Ukraine as well but with a view to finding some mechanisms to resolve this basically our challenge is convincing Vladimir Putin that this is not in his best interests but of course Putin still thinks at this juncture that he can prevail because he can push more men onto the battlefield

this talk of 500,000 additional troops for example. Now, Alison, I think on that we're supposed to go to a break. And let's get back again soon. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samarik here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter.

And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment. moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling

to come to terms with all of these issues, and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm doing. I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and we'll be talking about one of

of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Fiona, when I was listening to your book earlier today, particularly when it's speeded up, the account of what Donald Trump was like as president is utterly horrific. It feels like a child has taken over the White House. It feels like a narcissist is in control. It feels like no serious policy decision making is going on. It's all being driven by his ego. He doesn't read briefs. He doesn't listen to

people like you, he's vile to the people around him, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One, what was that like? Two, were you not tempted at any point just to say, up with this, I'm off? And three, what are the risks to America and the world if he comes back? Well, look, I think the risks to America and the world of a return are pretty evident for all the things that you've just laid out there. And, you know, this fits into exactly what we've been talking about. I mean, we're in a world right now of so-called strong men, hyper-personalized politics,

where we can think of so many different countries that fall into this format, and, you know, very little concern about the greater good. I mean, here we are also talking against the backdrop of an utterly horrific earthquake in Turkey. And already we can see, you know, that getting bogged down into questions about the future of Erdogan, another very personalized presidential system there, the upcoming Turkish elections that have been called for May of this year. And instead of actually thinking about all of the huge challenges that we've got to face and to tackle here,

we're in the realm of personalized politics and frankly narcissistic leaders, which goes back to, again, when the question of why didn't I ever go into politics to say exactly because I didn't want to have to deal with this sense of issues head on in that context. because every time that you want to actually address something, the ability to do to get distorted by these big egos, you know, pulling things out. Now, when I, you know, think about this in the context of Trump, I had nothing to do with the campaign. I'm not a member of a political party in the United States.

I'm a registered independent. I basically went into the administration as asked by people around. I'd never met Donald Trump, you know, before. But I did know a couple of the people who had ended up in his administration from my work on Russia and previous work as the National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia in which I spanned the presidencies of George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, at least the beginning of the Obama administration. And it was really in response to the fact that the Russians had interfered in the election in 2016. And having been a former national intelligence officer, I was pretty familiar with what they're doing. And I'd been monitoring Russia and working on Russia since 1984. And my whole professional life, I've lived there. I spend

a lot of time looking at. I knew what was going on. basically. And I felt that once I was asked, I really had to step up. Now, I obviously knew from the campaign and the same observations that everybody else had that this was going to be difficult. I don't think I'd fully process quite what Trump was like until I actually saw him in person. And then, as I actually mentioned in the book, I think the most helpful preparation was reading Alice in Wunderlander, almost through the looking glass, because I felt like at times that I'd landed up in a rather surreal world. So keeping a sense of humour on all the of this was an important way of making it way through. But it was also, you know, as somebody who's

historian and, you know, an analyst by training, I was suddenly seeing all the things that I'd ever read about and thought about unfolding in real time in the way that, obviously, he launched an attempted coup. He was trying to, you know, pervert foreign policy. All the kinds of sort of of things you think, well, what would that be like? There you were, you were kind of seeing it in real time. You were feeling that you had to do something. So I didn't initially think that I should step away. I felt that I should, you know, stay there and try to do something, but I had given myself a very strict time limit of two years, and I stayed on a little bit longer than that, because I didn't want to be part of the problem. I didn't want to get into the campaign.

Let's just say, I only just left a week before the infamous phone call, which didn't, you know, kind of in any way, enable me to walk away from all of that. And frankly, you know, I didn't want to because, you know, this is a real cautionary tale. And you've both been engaged and your own in similar cautionary tales. But this is something that we have to be really aware of at the way that politics can really distort things the most critical times. Just to push you a little bit on this, that you came in as a political appointee, and you came in because you had a friend who was on Fox News, who was part of Trump's campaign. Many Republican foreign policy analysts had refused to serve in his administration. Many of them had written an open letter condemning him. Colleagues of

your former colleagues from Harvard were amongst those who were very clear that they weren't going to serve in the Trump administration. I'd say this as somebody who resigned from Boris Johnson's cabinet and wouldn't ever have wanted to serve with him. I do find it a bit difficult to understand how you could still, with all that was going on in that campaign, the way that he conducted himself against Hillary Clinton, could possibly have believed this was going to work. Look, the Russians had interfered in the election. This was a national security crisis. So, you know, I thought about this in many respects as, you know, in case of emergency break, glass, pull handle. And it wasn't just, you said, you know, it was a friend, you know, from Fox News.

It's Katie McFarland. It was somebody I'd got to know through the Council on Foreign Relations. And I'd been on her Fox News show a couple of times to talk about Putin in, you know, kind of pretty unvarnished terms. But I also knew several other people, and I don't want to name all of them here, who had gone in for the same sort of reasons as I'm describing because of, you know, various other connections. two people in the campaign to try to do something about what Russia had done. And of course, I did have a lot of people say to me, don't do it. And I'll never speak to you again for these reasons that you just laid out. And several of them have not. But others who said, look, you know, somebody's got to go in there and do something. And that's honestly how I felt. And part of it was

also, I wasn't doing this for career. I wasn't doing this for, you know, some kind of enhancement. I was already in my 50s. So, I mean, there was all of people I worked with were much younger and it was actually devastating for them, you know, to really kind of see these distortions in American politics and things that they'd never expect it would happen. And what I hope would happen would be that national security would prevail and that, you know, something would be done. And I can just assure you that behind the scenes and awful lot of things were done to head off all kinds of things that could have been an absolute disasters, including, you know,

efforts to get the Russians out of our systems. So, you know, I was working very close with people behind the scenes. You know, part of the other problem as well is it's the politics around all of that, which I wasn't, you know, part of, but which I was obviously observing and trying to do something in that context, which was this belief that, you know, Trump was being run by Moscow and that Putin had actually taken the election for him. That was not true. Americans elected Trump. By narrow margins, of course, because he hadn't won the popular vote, but because of the vagaries of the electoral college, which had happened on several other occasions before.

And I mean, I also understood, coming from where I did, about these popular sentiments. I knew exactly what was going on. Why were people voting? People I know voted for Brexit. for very similar kinds of reasons, not to take control of sovereignty, but because they wanted something done to deal with their grievances from being left behind in different places. So I knew what was going on around the whole Trump churn. And I also came to quickly understand that Putin might be able to influence Trump in somewhere, but Trump would never do actually anything for Putin

because he'd only do something for himself. And it turns out that Trump actually didn't even really know Putin. Trump created huge holes for himself. over and over and over again. And, you know, we needed to have people in place to try to do something to push back. This was absolutely said a national emergency is what had happened. So I don't regret doing it. Fiona, how did you feel when Putin is standing alongside Trump, and Trump, this is in Helsinki,

Trump effectively sided with Putin against the word of the American intelligence community of which you're a part? That must, you must at that point of thought, oh my God, I can't quite be. believe that just happened. I can't quite believe that the president of the country of which I'm now a citizen is actually taking the word of Putin over the word of the intelligence agencies. Well, I couldn't believe that the president, the United States would do that, but sadly I could believe that Donald Trump would do that because it is also his personal obsession with strong men and great leaders. And I've written about that at some length in the book. That, you know, for him,

it was not Russia and it wasn't the Russian president per se, but it was Putin and the image of Putin's, this kind of iconic, you know, strongman. And he talked about this all the time that, you know, Putin was the kind of, in terms of his style and approach, the kind of leader that he wanted to be, which is, again, you know, something that really needed to be pushed back against and which is, again, gets back to your question at the end about what on earth would this be like if he comes back? And Fiona, one of the things that's at the heart of your story, I think, is a very unusual difference between the American and British system and foreign policy. You came in having been an

academic. You did a doctorate at Harvard. You were at Harvard for a very long time. You were at think tanks, such as Brookings, you're at the Council on Foreign Relations. And then you came in and else of these various administrations in a way that doesn't happen in British foreign policy. Do you think British foreign policy would be better if it was open in that way, if it was more open for people from academics and things, or indeed if it had that whole infrastructure, one of the differences between America and Britain, is that whole infrastructure, Brookings, Council, on foreign relations, Harvard, which seems to provide in and out these officials at senior levels when we have a much more professionalised civil service system that's much less porous.

Well, look, I do think you need to have a professionalised civil service, but that degrees of porosity, the ability to go in and out is helpful in certain contexts. It's also helpful in France science and technology, you know, in the energy sphere, you know, to bring in people with innovative backgrounds. I mean, I think, you know, the risk is things that, you know, both systems are complaining about, which is cronyism and nepotism and, you know, kind of bringing in people who are unsuited to the task, which you can see plenty of as well. So it doesn't always work to enhance policy.

But if there's specific areas of expertise, I think it's extremely useful. And of course, the UK does have Chatham House, ISS, and a whole host of other, and universities with, you know, extraordinary good people in there as well. And I do know that there have been, you know, some people have gone into the foreign office and advisory roles, obviously, within Parliament and the House of Lords, you know, for example. And, you know, you do use outside expertise. But I still think it needs to, you know, be carefully managed because, I mean, one of the problems in the United States also is that the political appointees, because, you know, you said I was a political appointee, but there's a lot of people who come in on these, you know, more expert, you know, type roles. And people get detailed from the national laboratories, for example. but the idea of the so-called deep state, it's actually in America quite thin.

There are so many of these political appointees that actually sometimes the functions of government get gumbed up because, you know, they don't have people in place. And that's why you're always reading that one year out, two years out, sometimes even three years out in administration, there aren't various assistant secretaries or other kind of people in place that would be vital under normal circumstances because they haven't been approved by Congress, for example, or they haven't been able to fill them all because, of some of the difficulties. So, I mean, I think there are strengths and weaknesses in both systems. For me, myself, unable to come in there. I wasn't gunning for some higher appointment. So actually, I think it enabled me to be much more mission-focused and objective. I didn't want somebody's vote. I wasn't there for the money. I mean, I took a, you know, huge pay cut as most people do when they go into the public service jobs, and, you know, so they should in any case. And I wasn't out there, you know, trying to honor a political campaign or trying to think about

what my next big job in Washington, D.C. was. And so in a way, that actually enabled me to counteract some of the things that, you know, obviously people were throwing at me as, you know, how could you possibly do this? You said earlier that Putin, in a way, as a warning. And the US and the UK are perhaps not as immune to the sort of forces that have led to such an authoritarian taking over in Russia for as long as he has. Now, I guess Trump and the attempted coup is a part of that. But you also put Brexit in the similar category, that Brexit, you think was a product of some of these forces. Just elaborate on that a bit. Yeah, I mean, look, for me, I didn't just watch Brexit from afar. I was on frequent trips back home, and it was a

constant discussion. And, you know, many people who were observing it from London, completely misread what was going on in the rest of the country, because they don't go out and talk to people. And, you know, there are very similar patterns in the old industrial heartland of Britain as there are in the United States. If you think about the election of Trump, was 70,000 people in three counties and three states. You know, basically the Michigan's, Pennsylvania, Ohio's and other, you know, states are like this that were the old industrial heartland. Well, a lot of people feel that they've had everything pulled out from underneath them,

their jobs, their identities, you know, there's a cultural aspect of this. It's not just work and economic downturn. But in places like the northeast of England, you know, people that feel like that they've just been left behind for decades, you know, going back to the 1960s and certainly the 70s and 80s and not getting the kind of investment. We know this from what was actually, I think, the very excellent recent government paper on leveling up, the white paper, that spells all of this out, frankly,

that should have been done decades ago. But out of those kinds of economic grievances and then the social and cultural that come with them comes that discontent that can be easily exploited in populist politics. And I saw that in the UK in terms of the way that UK and Nigel Farage and others, you know, whipped things up. It was reminiscent for me of things that I'd seen in the 1970s and 80s when I was, you know, growing up in the United Kingdom.

And, you know, people believing things that were just completely untrue about, you know, what was actually going on behind the scenes. So, you know, I lay this out in the book, a lot of the parallels. I mean, yes, there were people in Britain who wanted Brexit because of, you know, the way that they felt about the European Union and the way that European Union managed its budget or, you know, kind of various issues related to UK sovereignty or the application of European law and obviously migration. Although, you know, if you went to the north of England, didn't see much of terms of

immigration and migration, but there was a sense that people in the north were excluded from going to the south and, you know, forgetting work because so many other people were pouring into London and they couldn't possibly afford to go there. But there's all of those other dynamics, but there was definitely this very palpable, similar feeling to both Brexit. and the Trump phenomenon, you know, for someone going backwards and forwards. And, you know, Trump himself bizarrely references this. Remember he's in Turnbury playing golf at the very moment of the Brexit referendum. And he says, you know, to the press, the United States will have its own Brexit shortly.

And people think, what the heck is he talking about? But he's really meaning that populist upsurge movement. He was already reading the polls back home in the United States and realizing that people were in a way, you know, going to vote against Washington, as if Washington were Brussels, because it's... the deep state, the out-of-touch elites who are not doing anything to basically support the average person who's been left behind. Yeah. Fiona, last question from me, and then I'll hand back to Alistair. What do you make of Britain's foreign policy in its vision of the world? I was a foreign office minister. I was a British

diplomat. And I've been very struck over the years by the sense that Britain looks very strongly to the United States and in the absence of the United States struggles to work. out what its foreign policy position should be. So it tends to echo if Biden shifts towards Pacific, it abandons its Africa strategy. If Trump comes in, it panics and worries about what's going to happen if the US president takes things in a different direction. Where do you think British foreign policy is and where do you think it ought to be? How should a country of our size think about foreign policy compared to the way the US thinks about foreign policy? Well, look, I think part of the problem with that whole issue that you've just described,

and I think you've actually described where Britain's foreign policy is pretty accurately, you know, as far as I can see it as well, is this kind of persistence of everyone thinking about the United States as being the determinant factor in Europe. And of course, this gets back to Vladimir Putin, who thinks that's the case as well. He thinks that this whole war in Ukraine is really a war about the future of the United States' role in Europe. He still thinks as the United States as an occupying. force. And the way that, you know, you frankly, or you just describe the way that United Kingdom thinks about foreign policy in the absence of the United States, we just underscore

that for Putin. Putin kind of thinks in a way that, you know, all the countries of Europe and especially the UK are just simply reflections of the United States. In fact, the Chinese often refer to American countries as well, meaning, you know, United Kingdom and European countries. And it's really kind of, you know, the artifact of 70-odd years ago of, you know, that sort of division of Europe, Potsdam, Yalta, with Roosevelt and, you know, the artifact. then Churchill playing a kind of a key role, the idea that Europe is still divided between America and Russia, and Russia wants to be the dominant player.

Now, like, it seems to be high time, that countries of the European space, so I'm not just talking about the EU or NATO here, but countries like the United Kingdom, Norway, I was in Norway a couple of weeks ago, and I had very similar conversations there, start to think about how they want to interact in the European security sphere,

but also, as you're also suggesting globally. And I know that the United Kingdom obviously has decided to leave the European Union and was never very comfortable with the foreign policy structures that emerged there. But this isn't actually a time for rethinking and refocusing based on some of the major challenges that we're facing here. It's not just in the war in Ukraine, but how are we going to deal with climate change? Exactly how we're going to deal with the challenge of a rising China and the risks. I'm actually being very struck here, to be honest, in the last few weeks that there seems to be an increasing time.

tone in the United States about the inevitability of a major clash between China and the United States. I mean, I'm shocked sometimes that people just talk about it as if it's going to happen inevitably. And of course, we've had a few, you know, US military leaders talking about this, but it seems to be a tone that's emerging in think tank and other discussions. I mean, countries like Britain are going to have to think, especially, you know, given the legacy of the ties with Hong Kong and the whole East Asia ongoing ties with Singapore, et cetera, about how, you know, the UK could push back against this or basically reflect upon that possibility and to basically do something in the diplomatic field. I think what is the time for is a reassessment of where the

world is. And we have in the wake of the pandemic, there's also the opportunity to do this. I do keep thinking back to World War II when Churchill, you know, basically was always saying, never let a good crisis go to waste. You know, this is a crisis. It's a crisis of, you know, UK, domestic politics, but as you're saying, a crisis of foreign policy, and it's a time to start engaging, you know, with all of other countries to think of a way forward. And thinking about some strategic autonomy from the United States, most honestly, I mean, obviously the war in Ukraine makes that difficult to contemplate. But I do also think that the United States has been guilty in the past of infantilising the UK and Europe and of not, you know, kind of pushing

enough. And I was just, you know, kind of doing it in strange ways of talking about leading from behind and hands off that have not, you know, given clear messaging. And obviously under Trump, are just this kind of belligerence, you know, half the time about the relationships. This is my last question. I'm really struck in your book about how much themes of class and gender, the sexism, a lot of it not very casual that you've faced through your career, including from Trump, but right through your career in a way, you're really acute observations about class. and your honest admission that you really are an exception that proves a rule in the way that you've managed to have the career that you've had.

And I was disappointed when you said to Roy that you couldn't imagine yourself as a Labour MP. Because when I hear you talking about the importance of education, the importance of, you know, the extension of opportunity and taking down barriers, and I see somebody who has had an experience of that and actually could now bring an awful lot to bear in the political spirit. face. And, you know, you've, so you work for Trump, you work for Obama, you work for George W. Bush. You write a lot in the book about politicians, including Thatcher and Reagan. I get the sense that you feel that what Thacher, Reaganomics and Thatcher did wasn't really, you know, a lot of the problems we now face stem from that time. And I just sort of feel we need people like you,

going into politics as politicians, not just as public servants. And so I'm giving you one last chance to say, well, maybe I might think about it one day. There's a lot in that last question. But I think that everybody can be politically engaged, you know, in the ways that you are now as well, not just in the positions that you had before. Lots of people listen to this podcast, right, and who, you know, we're trying to think about things that they can do. I think everyone's got agency.

We can all step up. There is an incredible work being done in nonprofits in the United Kingdom. You know, I come across all the time about people who are doing things at the local and national level. And they, you know, they push the government to. to do more as well. You know, I mentioned before the leveling up paper. I mean, that was partly written by Andy Haldane, who used to have obviously an official position

is now the head of the Royal Society of the Arts. So there are all kinds of people out there doing things. And I'm definitely, you know, kind of figuring out what platforms that I can do. But I do think that, you know, once you start to run for office, you're asking people for money, you're asking people for their votes, you have to end up pandering to special interests. And, you know, you can't take sometimes the risks that you want to. do because you won't get elected. I mean, there were an awful

lot of people who are out there who, you know, get pushed back. What about this as a compromise then? What about becoming a foreign policy advisor to a Labour government led by Kier Starma? How would that sound? Kind of as that was an interesting, nobody suggested that one before. So, you know, I would have to... I just did. Well, let's say we'll have to see. You know, have to see on that one.

I'm always willing to, you know, provide my observations and advice for free. So anytime, you know, anybody wants to ask me, you know, I'm quite willing. Look, and I know that a lot of the answers remain elusive for all of us out there. I think, you know, one of the things I'm also trying to do by, you know, talking to you as many people as I can, just about how complicated things are here and, you know, to try to figure out what the frames in which we can approach things. And I think the more dialogue that we can have, the more, you know, hard questions we can all try to thrash out in an environment like this where, you know, you can do something that's thought-provoking. and that, you know, maybe some ideas, you know, might come out of it.

I mean, the better. I mean, it's been a real honour and privilege for me to talk to both of you. And you'd ask me a question at the very beginning, you know, about why the obsession with Russia really came out of that whole atmosphere of war scare in 1983. Although we didn't actually know at the time that we were on the brink almost of a nuclear confrontation with Russia or the Soviet Union then over the stationing of the SS20 in Pershing missiles. We could all feel it. I mean, any of us who were, you know, around at the time knew,

it's something dreadful was happening. And that's that kind of environment we've got again. We're in the midst of one of those major national security crisis, very dangerous periods. And I feel like it's all hands on deck, you know, in whatever way it makes the most sense. Well, listen, thanks for being so generous with your time, Fiona. Thank you for writing a splendid book which got me through a very, very long journey. I've never done fast speeded up audible before. I hope you didn't kind of speed up the drive as well. I'll be like tearing around in the French countryside, at Breckneck Speed.

Yeah. Well, it's a very good read. And you have had an amazing life. And were your mum and dad still around? I'm sure they'd be incredibly proud of you. Well, thank you so much, Alistair. It's just a pleasure. And, you know, it's really great to talk to you and Rory.

And, you know, Rory, I hope you're going to go on another of your walks of Britain. That was wonderful to watch. Are you going to do that again? I need to find a bit of time. I'm running a non-profit in Africa at the moment. So I think I'm walking in Britain. and there's a little bit on the back burner at the moment. But, you know, that had a real impact on people,

because I think that someone like you doing something like that and sort of, you know, showing up and people seeing it, it's the kind of, you know, thing that Derek Foster and shows that people care. And I think that really had a huge impact. Thank you. All right, Jenna, listen, good luck with everything. Thank you.

So, Rory, that was Jane Hill. What do you make about? Well, I thought it was very interesting. I mean, there's a paradox, which you were. pointing to there, which is that absolutely, in a loss of what she says about her social background, about her experience of Mrs. Thatcher, about the destruction of the coal mines, about the destruction British industry, made her sound very much like somebody from the left. And I would have thought she would be a natural Labour Party supporter. But when you questioned her on it, she was very reluctant

to go down there. And actually, of course, she served in a Trump administration. And there were also hints that she also thought that she didn't like the way that either Labour or Conservatives responded to Thatcher in the 1980s, that she was uncomfortable with both sides of that divide. Was that the sense you got? Yeah, I wonder whether what came through in that is the sense of being a civil servant, being somebody who is an advisor and who will advise whatever government is put before. Listening to the book, as my Fiona and I did as we drove down through France, I lost count of the number of times I said to Fiona.

Oh, she's got to be a Labour MP. She must become a Labour MP. This woman has got Labor MP read all over her. But as you said, was quite reluctant to even to consider that point. I actually was a bit disappointed by her, you know, the way that she sort of, I felt was dismissive of politics in that way. Yeah. And listen, I think if you've been through the experience, she must have been through with Trump, which sounded horrific and in the book comes across as just an absolutely awful period in her life, trying to advise in a sensible way on a big decision, a big policy area like Russia with that with this kind of crazy narcissist around the place. But I think sometimes it's, you know, you and I've had this discussion before. It's sometimes I think too easy to say, well, all

politicians are terrible. They're not all terrible. It's just that, you know, she worked for a one who is particularly terrible. Well, there's also this question of getting, getting distance, because I, I did think that she's still sort of strangely unreflective and defiant about having been one of Trump's political appointees. And I know she glossed over it, and I didn't want to push her too hard, because I got a very defensive reaction I felt back. But the truth was, if you remember during that campaign, that a lot of the Republican foreign policy establishment came out against Trump, 50 of them who would have been in exactly the roles that she was in, signed a letter, including my colleague Megano Sullivan, for example, at Harvard, saying he was a clear and present danger to the United States

and that they would never serve in his administration. So it can't quite be that she went in entirely naively, not knowing what she was doing. And I think she still hasn't quite processed how to deal with that and how to answer the question, because it's difficult not to be a bit surprised by the naivety of that. She's now coming out and saying the man's a horrible man, he was horrible to work with. He was a total disaster. But the fact was, almost everybody I knew could see that in advance. She partly went in, I didn't put her on this too much because I like her and I think she's a great analyst of Russia, but she went in to work from partly because she was, I think, also somebody who knew General Flynn, who was this amazing Russian-connected conspiracy theorist who he made as

national security advisor. Yeah, I look sometimes at the people who stayed in the civil service working for Boris Johnson. She's not a civil servant. Let me interrupt on that. She's a political appointee. It would be like you going to work for Boris Johnson. Yeah, I guess. I see, I see where you're coming. I know she's not a civil servant in a technical sense, but my point is that I think that's how she sees herself as a policy advisor. That's the way Bern-Worris tried to present himself. Do you remember at the end of Boris Johnson's time? He said I can't come out against him because I'm, you know, doing this important job running the war, etc. Some people do try to make those arguments, but I still, I wasn't completely satisfied with that.

No, but I think for me, the sort of big picture story of her life is, I just love the story of somebody who grew up in this pretty poor family in Bishop Auckland and became something that she would never, she and her family would never have expected her to because she, she sort of dreamt big about what she could achieve. And I love that. And I also love the fact that she's, you know, she's got knowledge, real deep knowledge about something, but also, I think was. quite reflective about the position that she found herself and not necessarily herself as a human being, but as somebody who was trying to advise on a serious policy issue. I agree. The only other thing I'd slightly push back on is I was sad if she really feels that the only way that someone like her from her background can make a life is to go to the United States, because obviously we've just interviewed David Lammy, who's made an incredible success for himself from a very difficult background in Britain. And we've had a long tradition of that, right back to Ramsey MacDonald,

back to Lloyd George. And in fact, the US has a very important. very, very unequal society. If you're holding up a society as an example of a place to make something itself. As you know, the other book I've been reading for another interview we're going to be doing with Bernie Sanders, that comes through. America is a deeply unequal society. One thing that comes through the book very, very strongly is her very, very strong feelings about class and about gender, which I don't think came through that much in the interview, but I think she's more driven by that than maybe came through in the interview. Yes, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a huge important part of her book, and I read it too. Anyway,

It was great that we got her on, and I think her views on Russia are fascinating. I would have liked to hear much more from her on her views on UK foreign policy, maybe because she's now in a senior American. She has to be a bit careful what she says about that, but I bet she'd have some amazing more things to say on that, and thank you for getting her on the show. We'll see you soon. Bye-bye.