Fiona Hill is a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 off - Calm: https://calm.com/lex to get 40% off premium - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil - LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack EPISODE LINKS: Fiona's Books: There Is Nothing for You Here: https://amzn.to/3TR0nN9 Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin: https://amzn.to/3WiGU9F PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:24) - Education and career (17:10) - Donbas in the 20th century (25:28) - Soviet Union (36:03) - Donald Trump's foreign policy (48:03) - Testifying against Donald Trump (54:54) - US administrations (1:16:28) - Impeachment of Donald Trump (1:36:44) - Why people like Donald Trump (1:45:49) - Vladimir Putin (2:05:58) - Invasion of Ukraine (2:21:03) - NATO implication in Ukraine war (2:33:54) - Interviewing Vladimir Putin (2:46:22) - 2024 elections (2:49:30) - Alexei Navalny (2:54:03) - Nuclear war (3:05:54) - How Ukraine war will end (3:12:40) - Hope for the future (3:15:48) - Advice for young people
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. She has served the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump. She has made it to the White House from humble beginnings in the north of England, a story she tells in her book, There's Nothing for You Here.
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I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. They bring me happiness and maybe they will bring happiness to you as well. This show is brought to you by Mizzen and Main. I'm wearing a Mizzen and Main shirt right now. They make comfortable, stylish, I'm not sure why there was an increase in intonation.
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Chapter 2: How did Fiona Hill's upbringing influence her career path?
And within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone and it's on a different track entirely.
Well, I wonder if we reran the 20th century a thousand times, how many times the Soviet Union would collapse.
Yeah, I wonder about that too. And I also wonder about what would have happened if it didn't collapse and Gorbachev had found a different direction.
I mean, we see a very divisive time now in American history. The United States of America has very different cultures, very different beliefs, ideologies within those states, but that's kind of the strength of America. There's these little laboratories of ideas.
Until, though, that they don't keep together. I mean, I've had colleagues who have described what's happening in the West right now as a kind of soft secession with states, you know, going off in their own direction. In which states? Well, these kinds of conceptions that we have now of divisions between red and blue states because of the fracturing of our politics.
And I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible in somewhere like the United States or, you know, many other countries as well, because there wasn't that ethnic dimension. But in fact, many of the way that people talk about politics has given it that kind of appearance in many respects.
Because, look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union and the Soviet period and from where you're from, you know, originally in Ukraine, that language is not the main signifier of identity and that identity can take all kinds of other forms.
That's really interesting. I mean, but there has to be a deep grievance of some kind. If you took a poll in any of the states in the United States, I think a very small minority of people would want to actually secede, even in Texas, where I spend a lot of my time. I think that there is a common kind of pride of nation.
There's a lot of people complain about government and about how the country's going, the way people complain about the weather when it's raining. They say, oh, this stupid weather, it's raining again. Yeah. But really what they mean is we're in the smock together. There's a together there.
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Chapter 3: What key experiences shaped Fiona Hill's perspective on education?
That's one of the things you just do. You don't get anywhere on that front.
Well, I mean, it's possible.
Tough measures and maximum pressure often does work. Because there were often times where that kind of relentless nagging about something or constantly raising it actually did have results where it hadn't previously. So there's the maximum pressure
If it kind of kept on it in the right way and often when we were coming in behind on pushing on issues related to NATO or other things in this same sphere, it would actually have an effect. It just doesn't get talked about because it gets overshadowed by all of the other kind of stuff around this and the way that he interacted with people and treated people.
What was the heart, the key insights to your testimony in that impeachment?
Look, I think there is a straight line between that whole series of episodes and the current war in Ukraine. Because Vladimir Putin and the people around him in the Kremlin concluded that the U.S. did not care one little bit about Ukraine and it was just a game. For Trump, it was a personal game.
He was basically trying to get Volodymyr Zelensky to do him a personal favor related to his desire to stay on in power in the 2020 election. And generally, they just thought that we were using Ukraine as some kind of proxy or some kind of instrument within our own domestic politics, as that's what it looked like. And I think that as a result of that,
Putin took the idea away that he could do whatever he wanted. We were constantly being asked, even prior to this, by people around Putin, like Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the National Security Council equivalent in Russia, who we met with frequently. What's Ukraine to you? We don't get it. Why do you even care?
So they thought that we weren't serious, that we weren't serious about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence, or it is a national security player. And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate the political space in the United States. Actually, he could, because what he was doing was seeding all this dissent and fueling, you know, already in a debate inside of U.S.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Vladimir Putin's leadership style?
And people decide they couldn't have one with Hillary Clinton. And, you know, maybe they could go off and have one with Barack Obama and with Donald Trump. They didn't want to have one with Joe Biden, you know, for example. And remember, George W. Bush didn't drink, so he wouldn't have had a beer with him. He'd have gone out and got a soda or something with him.
But, you know, there's that kind of element of just that sort of personal connection in the way that the whole presidential election is set up. It's less about the parties. It's less about the platforms. It's more about the person.
Yeah. And picking one side and sticking with your person, really like a support team.
Yeah, it is. Yeah.
What do you think about Vladimir Putin, the man and the leader? Let's actually look at the full, you've written a lot about him, the recent Vladimir Putin and the full context of his life. Let's zoom out and look at the last 20 plus years of his rule. In what ways has he been good for Russia? In what ways bad?
Well, if you look to the first couple of terms, of his presidency, I think, you know, on the overall ledger, you would have actually said that he made a lot of achievements from Russia. Now, there was, of course, the pretty black period of the war in Chechnya, but, you know, he didn't start that. That was Boris Yeltsin. That was obviously a pretty catastrophic event.
But if you look at then other parts of the ledger of what Putin was doing, you know, from the 2000s, you know, onwards, you know, He stabilized the Russian economy, brought back confidence in the Russian economy and financial system.
He built up a pretty impressive team of technocrats for everything, the central bank and the economics and finance ministries, who really got the country back into shape again and solvent, paid off all of the debts. And, you know, really started to build the country back up again domestically.
And, you know, the first couple of terms, again, putting Chechnya, you know, to one side, which is a little hard because, I mean, there was quite a lot of atrocities. And I have to say that, you know, he was pretty involved in all of that because the FSB, which he'd headed previously, you know, was in charge of wrapping up Chechnya.
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Chapter 5: In what ways has Putin's perspective on history influenced his actions?
They weren't being taxed. The taxes were coming out of the extractive industries. There was, you know, kind of, I guess, a sense of much more political pluralism. It wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Eltsin period. And then you see a shift. And it's pretty much when he comes back into power again in 2011, 2012. And that's when we see kind of a different phase emerging.
And, you know, part of it is the larger international environment where Putin himself has become kind of convinced that the United States is out to get him. And part of it goes back to the decision on the part of the United States to invade Iraq in 2003.
There's also the recognition of Kosovo in 2008 and the whole kind of machinations around all kinds of other issues of NATO expansion and elsewhere. But Iraq in 2003 and this kind of whole idea after that that the United States is in the business of regime change and perhaps has him in his crosshairs as well.
But there's also then kind of, I think, a sense of building crisis after the financial crisis and the Great Recession, 2008, 2009, because I think Putin up until then believed in, you know, the whole idea of the global financial system and that Russia was prospering and that Russia, you know, part of the G8 and actually could be genuinely one of the, you know, the major economic and financial powers.
And then suddenly he realizes that the West is incompetent, that, you know, we totally mismanaged the economy of our own, the financial crash in the United States, the kind of blowing up of the housing bubble, and that we were feckless. And that had global reverberations. And he's prime minister, of course, you know, in this kind of period.
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Chapter 6: How does the conflict in Ukraine reflect broader geopolitical dynamics?
But then, you know, and I think that that kind of compels him to kind of come back into the presidency and try to kind of take things under control again in 2007, 2012. And after that, he goes into kind of a much more sort of focused role where he sees the United States as a bigger problem.
And he also, you know, starts to, you know, kind of focus on also the domestic environment because his return to the presidency is met by protests. And he genuinely seems to believe, because again, this is very similar to belief here in the United States that Donald Trump couldn't possibly be elected by Americans. There somehow was some kind of
external interference because the Russians interfered and had an impact. Putin himself thinks at that time, it's one of the reasons why he interferes in our elections later, that the United States and others had interfered because he knew that people weren't that thrilled about him coming back. They kind of liked the Medvedev period. And the protests in Moscow and St.
Petersburg and other major cities, he starts to believe are instigated by the West, by the outside. Because of, you know, funding for transparency in elections and, you know, all of the NGOs and others, you know, they're operating, State Department, embassy funding, you know, and, you know, the whole attitudes of God is back, you know, kind of thing.
And so after that, we see Putin going on a very different footing. It's also somewhere in that period, 2011, 2012, we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine. And he's always, you know, I think, been kind of steeped in that whole view of Russian history. I mean, I heard at that time I was in, I've written about this and many of the things that, you know, I've written about Putin.
But in that same time frame, I'm going to all these conferences in Russia where Putin is and Peskov, his press secretary, and they talk about him reading Russian history. I think it's in this kind of period that he formulates this idea of the necessity of reconstituting the Russian world, the Russian Empire. He's obviously been very interested in this.
He's always said, of course, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of the 20th century, but also the collapse of the Russian Empire before it. And he starts to be critical about Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine as...
the same country ukrainians and russians being one in the same and this is where the ledger flips because i mean the initial question you asked me is about has russia has putin been good for russia or not and this is where we get into the uh focal point of uh or the point where he's not focusing on the prosperity and stability and future of russia but he starts to obsess about the past
and start to take things in a very different direction. He starts to clamp down at home because of the rise of opposition and the fact that he knows that his brand is not the same as it was before and his popularity is not the same as it was before because he's already gone over that period in...
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Chapter 7: What advice does Fiona Hill offer for engaging with Putin?
And in the very early part of the 1990s, there was a lot of pressure put on Ukraine and all the other former Soviet republics, now independent states, by people around, you know, Mayor Lushkov, for example, in Moscow.
by, you know, other forces in the Russian Duma, not just, you know, Vladimir Zhirinovsky and others, but, you know, really serious, you know, kind of what we would call here like right-wing, you know, nationalist forces. But it's, you know, pervasive in the system. And it's especially pervasive in the KGB and in the security sector. And that's where Putin comes out of.
Remember, Putin also was of the opinion that one of the biggest mistakes the Bolsheviks made was getting rid of the Orthodox Church as an instrument of the state. And so there's this kind of restorationist wing within the security services and the state apparatus that want to kind of bring back Russian Orthodoxy as a state instrument, an instrument of state power.
And they were kind of, you know, looking all the time about strengthening the state, the executive, the presidency. And so it's everybody who takes part in that. And it's also others who want power, honestly. And they see Putin as their vehicle for power. I think of people like Sergei Kiryenko. I knew Kiryenko back in the 90s. I mean, my God, that guy's all in. Or like Dmitry Medvedev.
You know, who was, you know, a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin. Certainly had a totally different perspective, wasn't it, in the KGB?
Did you say warmer, fuzzier version?
A warmer, fuzzier version, yeah. I mean, he's kind of like, he was literally a warm personality. I don't know if you watched him during the September 30th annexation. The guy had all kinds of facial twitches and looked so rigid and stiff that he looks like he might implode. I mean, that wasn't, you know, how he was, you know, earlier in his career.
And he, you know, had a different view of Perestroika. We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia during Perestroika, he was in Dresden, watching the East German state fall apart. And, you know, dealing with the Stasi and in a kind of place where you weren't getting a lot of information about what was happening in West Germany, or even what was happening back home in Perestroika.
And he has that kind of group of people around him, the Patrashevs and Botnikovs and others. And Sergei Ivanov and others from the different configurations of his administration who have come out of that same kind of mindset and are kind of wanting to put everything back together again.
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