Fiona Hill

The current Pope as well.

But Putin, you know, anybody who actually stands for something that's different and actually looks like they actually mean it and is not trying, you know, to achieve, you know, something Putin can actually get his hands on and try to manipulate it.

I mean, that is more difficult for him.

But, you know, right now, Trump is playing to form.

It's the form that Putin expects.

And I'm pretty sure that Putin, you know, perhaps misplaced in any case, feels very confident that he can manage everything that's happening.

But I say that could be misplaced.

But it's not for the reasons of Trump suddenly getting religion to use this, you know, kind of metaphor and pull it out a bit further.

I'm sure he does, because he certainly had plenty of warnings in the past.

But I think at this point, and again, it seems that this is the trajectory that he's on, he's not really thinking of a period when peace breaks out.

He's become a wartime president, and I think he feels that he can keep a wartime economy ticking along for quite some time and maybe put off then the kinds of problems that he will inevitably face.

We're seeing all kinds of problems in the US economy, and the US economy is immensely resilient because of the structure of it and the nature of it.

And the Russian economy is resilient in similar but very different ways, more related to autarky and just the vastness of its natural resources.

But that, of course, makes it very difficult to...

to marshal them and to move into those value-added chains that we expect of a more sophisticated economy.

And Russia had been moving in that direction up until the full-on invasion of Ukraine, but it was quite difficult because its economic model was running out of steam.

And the war has injected a new head of steam into it.

Now, the one thing that Putin clearly doesn't care about is human capital.

And I mean, that is also very interesting because you wouldn't in that regard.

And this is why I think President Trump just doesn't get Putin at all.