Fiona Hill

There's a really great book called Collapse by Vladislav Zubok, who is a professor at London School of Economics at LSE.

And Zubok is pretty much my age, and he's from the former Soviet Union.

He's Russian.

And I mean, he describes it very quite aptly about how it was kind of the elites, you know, that basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart.

And there is a risk of that, you know, here as well, when you get partisan politics and people forgetting, you know, they're Americans and they are all in this together, like a lot of the population thing.

But they think that their own, you know, narrow partisan or ideological precepts, you know, count for more.

And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also a power play, you know, in a way that actually can't quite play out in the United States because it was the equivalent of governors in many respects who got together three of them, you know, in the case of the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who then, you know, got rid of, you know, basically the central government.

the central figure of Mikhail Gorbachev.

It would be a little difficult to do that.

The dynamic is not the same, but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up in the late 1980s and the early 90s.

I spent a lot of time in Russia, as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus, Central Asia and other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But you kind of see the same elite divisions here in the United States pulling in different directions and straining the overall body politic and the way that national politics gets imposed on local politics.

It certainly wasn't when I first came to the U.S.

in 1989.

I didn't, honestly, in 1989 when I first came here, I didn't know anybody's political affiliation.

I mean, I rarely knew their religious affiliation.

And, you know, obviously race was a major phenomenon here that was a shock to me when I first came.

But many of the kind of the class, regional, geographic, you know, kind of political dimensions that I've seen in other places, I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now.

Well, it means being very careful about not putting any kind of ideological lens on anything, you know, that I'm analyzing or looking at or saying about foreign policy, for one thing.

But also not taking, you know, kind of one stance of one party over another either.