Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump | Lex Fridman Podcast #335

We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does. You know, he has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context. And we've got to understand that. We've got to understand that he would take offense at something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessarily to blame by taking actions, but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and, and act accordingly or, you know, take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something.

What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon? 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. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill. You came from humble beginning in a coal mining town in northeast England. So what were some formative moments in your young life that made you the woman you are today?

Well, I was born in 1965, and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already. And, you know, basically my father, by the time I came along, had lost his job multiple times. Every coal mine he worked in was closing down. He was looking constantly for other work. And he had no qualifications because at age 14, he, he'd gone down the mines. His father had gone down the mines at 13, his great grandfather around the same kind of age. I mean, you had a lot of people at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, 14. They didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, hey, you're going to go down the mine like everybody else in your family. And then he didn't really have any of the qualifications to basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So worked in a steelworks that didn't work out, a brickworks that closed down. And then he went to work in the local hospital, part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, as a porter, an orderly. So basically, somebody's just pushing people around. There was no opportunity to retrain. So the big issue in My family was education. You've got to have one, you know, you've got to have some qualifications. The world is changing, it's changing really quickly. And for you to kind of keep up with it, you're going to have to get educated and find a way out of this. And very early on, my father had basically said to me, there's nothing for you here. You're gonna have to if you want to get ahead. And he didn't have any kind of idea that as a girl I wouldn't. I mean, actually, in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy. There was no expectation that I would go into industry. There was, you know, some kind of idea that maybe I, you know, if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse. My mother was a midwife and so she'd, at age 16, left school and gone to train as a nurse. And then as a midwife, I had other relatives who'd gone to teach in local schools. And so there was an idea that women could get educated and there was a kind of a range of things that you could do, but the expectation then was go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave. So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years, as I was trying to sort of find my way through life and looking forward.

First of all, what does that even look like, getting educated, given the context of that place? You don't know. There's a whole world of mystery out there. So how do you figure out what to actually do out there? But was there moments, formative moments, either challenging or just inspiring, where you wondered about what you want to be, where you want to go?

Yeah, there were, I mean, there were a number of things. I mean, I think like a lot of kids, you know, you talk to people, and particularly from blue collar backgrounds. So what did you want to do? Boys might say I wanted to be a fireman, you know, or you got, you know, kind of at one point, as a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse. And I had a little nurse's uniform, like my mother. I didn't really know what that meant. But, you know, I used to go around pretending to be a nurse. I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy and I used to read this and, you know, kind of that was one of the formative ideas. We also. It was a rural area, semi rural area, and, you know, I'd be out in the fields all the time and I'd watch farmers, you know, with their animals. And I'd see vets coming along and, you know, watching people deal with the livestock. And there was a kind of a famous story at the time about a vet called James Herriot. It became here in the United States as well, and was a sort of a TV miniseries. He'd written a book, and he was the vet for my. One of my great aunt's dogs. And people were always talking about him, and I thought, oh, I could be a vet. And then one day, I saw one of the local vets with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field, and he got his hand stuck and the cow was kicking him. And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe not. Actually, no, I don't think I want to be a vet. So I cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education, but the whole sense was you had to apply your education. It wasn't an education for education's sake. It was an education to do something. And when I was about 14 or 15, my local member of parliament came to the school, and it was one of these pep talks for kids in these deprived areas. He had been quite prominent in local education, and now he was a member of Parliament. He himself had come from a really hardscrabble background and had risen up through education. He'd even gone to Oxford and done philosophy, politics and economics. And he basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really to get ahead and go to elite institutions, look, you can get an education. You don't have to be held back by your circumstances. But if you do get an education, it's a privilege, and you need to do something with it. So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do? Okay, an education is a qualification. It's to do something. Most people around me I knew didn't have careers. I mean, my dad didn't really have a career. He had jobs. My mom, you know, thought of her nursing as a career, though, and it genuinely was. And she was out there trying to help women survive childbirth. My mother had these horrific stories, basically over the dining room table. I wish she'd stop. She'd leave out her nursing books. And I tell you, if everyone had had my mom as a mother, there'd be no reproduction on the planet. It was just these grim, horrific stories of breech births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, oh, my God, you know what? Please stop. So I thought, well, I don't necessarily want to go in that. In that direction. But it was the timing that really cinched things for me. I was very lucky that the region that I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive decline, deindustrialization, and the complete collapse of the local government system around me, still maintained money for education. And they also paid for exchanges. And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany and France, also in Russia. And Kostroma, near Yaroslavl, for example, an old textile town similar down in its kind of region, but quite historic in the Russian context. In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context. And so it was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages, I studied German, I studied French. And then in 1983, there was the war scare, basically provoked by the Euro Missile Crisis. So the station of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War and the Zero missile crisis over SS20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977. So when I was about 11 or 12 all the way through into the later part of the 1980s, and in 1983, we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict. It was very much another rerun of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. So 20 years on, same kind of thing. The Soviets misread, although I didn't know this at the time, I know a lot of this after the fact. But the tension was palpable. But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises, Operation Able Archer, that the United States was conducting and actually thought that the United States might be preparing for a first nuclear strike, and that then set up a whole set of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union. Eventually it was recognized that all of this was really based on misperceptions. And of course, that later led to negotiations between Gorbachev and Reagan for the intermediate nuclear forces, the INF Treaty. But in 1983, that tension was just acute. And for as a teenager, we were basically being prepped the whole time for the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon. There were TV series films in the United States and the UK Threads. The day after, we had all these public service announcements telling us to seek sanctuary or cover in the inevitability of a nuclear blast. And my house was so small, they said, look for a room without a window. There were no rooms without windows. My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window and said, if there was a nuclear flash, you know, we'd have to, you know, get down on the floor, not look up, but the curtains would help. And we'd be like, this is ridiculous, dad. And we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs. A cupboard under the stairs, like Harry Potter. I mean, it's all just, you know, totally nuts or go. Or you have to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside. And I thought, well, this. This isn't going to work. And one of my great uncles who had fought in World War II said, well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona. Why don't you go and study Russian? Try to figure it out. Figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up. Because, you know, during the.

Go talk to them.

Exactly. During World War II, yeah, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union had all been wartime allies. And my Uncle Charlie thought, well, there's something gone wrong here. Maybe you can figure it out. And as you said, go talk to them. So I thought, okay, I'll study Russian. So that's really how this came about. I thought, well, it's applying education. I'll just do my very best to understand everything I possibly can about the Russian language and the Soviet Union, and I'll see what I can do. And I thought, well, maybe I could become a translator. So. So I had visions of myself sitting around listening to things in a big headset and best view translating perhaps at some future arms control summit.

So how did the journey continue with learning Russian? I mean, this early dream of being a translator and thinking, how can I actually help understand or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict that threatens the existence of the human species. How did it actually continue?

Well, I mean, I read everything I actually possibly could about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. And I started to try to teach myself Russian a little bit.

It was always in context of nuclear war.

It was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point, but also in historical context, because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies in World War II. So I tried to understand all of that. And also, like many other people, I. I read, you know, Russian literature in translation. I'd read War and Peace, and, you know, I'd loved the book, actually. I mean, particularly the, you know, the story parts of it. I wasn't one really at that. At that time, when I was a teenager, I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, you know, in terms of his series of the great man and of history and, you know, kind of social change. Though now I appreciate it more. But when I was about 14, I was like, this man needed an editor. You know, could he have just got on with the story? What an amazing story. What an incredible, you know, kind of book this is.

I still think he needs an editor.

But I think his wife tried, didn't she? But he got. He got quite, quite upset with her. And then I kind of thought to myself, well, how do I study Russian? Because there were very few schools in my region, given the impoverishment of the region, where you could study Russian. So I would have to take Russian from scratch. And this is where things get really quite interesting, because there were opportunities to study Russian at universities, but I would need to have, first of all, an intensive Russian language course in the summer, and I didn't have the money for that. And the period is around the miners strike in the United Kingdom in 1984. Now, the miners of County Durham had, very interestingly, had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbass going back to the 1920s. And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots of contacts between Bolshevik Soviet Union, the early period after the Russian Revolution, but even before that, during the imperial period in Russia, between the northern England and the Russian Empire and the old industrial areas, basically big industrial areas like the northeast of England and places like Donbass were built up at the same time, often by the same sets of industrialists. And Donetsk in the Donbass region used to be called Huzivka because it was established by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales to help kind of develop the coal mines there and also the steelworks and others that we're hearing about all the time. And so I got very fascinated in all these linkages. And famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union, like Yevgeny Zamyatin, worked in the shipyards in Newcastle Upon Tyne. And there was just this whole set of connections. And in 1984, when the miners strike took place, the miners of Donbass, along with other miners from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany, or miners in Poland, sent money in Solidarity to the miners of Candidarham. And there'd been these exchanges, as I said, going back and forth since the 1920s, formal exchanges between miners, the region, the miners unions. And I heard again from the same great uncle who told me to study Russian, that there were actually scholarships for the children of miners and it could be former miners as well for their education. And I should go along to the Miners Hall, a place called Red Hills, where the miners of County Durham had actually pooled all of their resources and built up their own parliament and their own, you know, kind of place that they could talk among themselves to figure out how to enhance the welfare and well being of their communities. And they'd put money aside for education for miners. There was all kinds of lecture series from the miners and all kinds of other activities, supporting soccer teams and artistic circles and writing circles, for example. People like George Orwell were involved in some of these writers circles in other parts of Britain in mining communities, for example. And so they told me I could go along and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian. So I show up and it was the easiest application I've ever come across. They just asked me to. My dad came along with me. They asked me to verify that my dad had been a minor. And they looked up his employment record on little cards kind of in a little tray somewhere. And then they asked me how much I needed to basically pay for the travel and some of the basic expenses for the study. And they wrote me a check. And so, thanks to the miners of Donbass and this money that was deposited with the miners of County Durham, of the Durham Miners Association, I got the money to study Russian for the first time before I embarked on my studies at university.

As you're speaking now, it's reminding me that there's a different way to look both at history and at geography and at different places. Is, you know, this is an industrial region.

That's right.

And it echoes. And the experience of living there is more captured not by Moscow or Kiev, but by, at least historically, but by just being a mining town. Industrial.

That's right. In the place itself. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are places in the United States, in Appalachia and West Virginia and in Pennsylvania, like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place. And the Northeast of England was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley, which has its own, I would say, contours and frames. And when you come to those industrial areas, your previous identities get submerged in that larger framework. I've always looked at the world through that lens of being someone from the working class, the blue collar communities, from a very specific place with lots of historical and economic connotations. And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems that the Donbass has experienced over the last 30 years, that people came from all over the place to work there. Of course, there was a population that one might say is indigenous, might have gone back centuries there, but they would have been in the smaller rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the northeast of England. And people, in the case of the northeast of England came from Wales. They came from further in the south of England, the Midlands. They came from Scotland, they came from Ireland. I have all of that heritage in my own personal background. And you've got a different identity. And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity on you from the outside that things go awry. And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in the case of Donbass. It's a place that's apart in many respects historically and in terms of its evolution and development over time. And particularly in the case of Russia, the Russians have tried to say, well, look, you know, because most people speak Russia, there is the lingua franca. I mean, in the northeast of England, of course, everyone spoke English, but lots of people were Irish speakers, you know, Gaelic Irish speakers, or, you know, some of them might have certainly been Welsh speakers. There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh as their first language, who came there, you know, but they. But they created an identity. It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster, you know, the northern province of the. You know, the whole of the Irish island, you know, the part of Ireland that is still part of the United Kingdom, that was also a heavily industrialized area. High manufacturing, mass manufacturing, shipbuilding, for example, people came from all over there, too, which is why when Ireland got its independence in the United Kingdom, Ulster, Belfast and that whole region, you know, kind of clung on because it was again, that melting pot. It was kind of intertwined with the larger industrial economy and had a very different identity. And so that, you know, for me, growing up in such a specific place, with such a special, in many respects, heritage gave me a different perspective on things. When I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study there, I actually went to a translators institute, what was then called the Morris Theres, which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages. I was immediately struck by how similar everything was to the north of England, because it was just like one big working class culture that sort of broken out onto the national stage. Everything in Northern England was nationalized. We had British Steel, British Coal, British Rail, British Shipbuilding. Because after World War II, the private sector had been devastated and the state had to step in. And of course, the Soviet Union is one great big giant nationalized economy when I get there. And it's Just the people's attitudes and outlooks are the same. People didn't work for themselves, they always worked for somebody else. And it had quite a distortion on the way that people looked at the world.

Do you still speak Russian?

I do, yeah. It would be a big mystery for everybody. And you have an advantage on me because it's your native language as well.

For people wondering, the English speakers in the audience, you're really missing a lot from the few sentences we said there. Yeah, it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across a very large part of this world. So there you are in 1987, exchange student in the Soviet Union. What was that world like?

Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period because it's the period that just around the time of the peak of perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president. Well, he wasn't quite president at that point. He saw Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union trying to transform the whole place. So I arrived there In September of 1987, just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty, just within kind of weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Euro missile crisis by finally having agreement on basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces. Also at this point, Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up. So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before. Not just in Moscow, which is where I was studying at the Translates Institute, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia, went all the way to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far east, all the way around Moscow. And there was, at this point, it was also the Krasin Ye Rus, which has become very important now. This is the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia, which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's. But 988, because I was there 87 to 88, at this point, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period. You suddenly had the church stepping out as a non governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. So that was something that I wasn't expecting to witness also. I mean, being in Moscow, this is the cultural capital of vast empire at this point. I'd never lived in a major city before. It's the first big city I lived in. I'd never been to the opera. The first time I got an opera, it's at the Bolshoi, you know, I'd never seen a ballet. I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture. When you kind of growing up in a mining region, there's very limited opportunities for this kind of thing. I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir. My parents signed me up. Props to everything they possibly could, education wise. But it wasn't exactly any exposure to this. So I was kind of astounded by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience that one could have in Moscow. But the main thing was I was really struck by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs, because this was Moscow, you know, I got this image about what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first about what I would see there, the big nuclear superpower. And as soon as I got there, it was just this like as if a huge weight that I'd been carrying around for years, in my teenage years just disappeared because it's just ordinary people in ordinary place not doing great. This is the period of what they call deficitne vremie, so the period of deficits. But there was no food in the shops, there was very little in terms of commodities, because the supply and demand parts of the economic equation were out of whack because this was total central planning. You'd go into a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pair of boots all in the same size, in the same color. I actually lucked out because one site was in this Hungarian boot shop that was right next to where my hall of residence was, and I was looking for a new pair of boots and every single pair of boots in the shop were my size and they were all women's boots. There were no men's boots at all, you know, because there was been an oversupply of boots and that size production. But you could really kind of see here that there was something wrong. And, you know, in the north of England, everything was closed down. The shops were shuttered because there was no demand, because everybody lost their jobs. There was massive employment. You know, when I went off to University in 1984, 90% youth unemployment in the UK, meaning that when kids left school, they didn't have something else to go on to unless they got to university or vocational training or an apprenticeship. And most people were still looking kind of months out of leaving school. And so shops were closing because people didn't have any money. I had 50% male unemployment in some of the towns as the steelworks closed down and the wagon works for the railways, for example, in my area. But in Moscow, people in theory did have money, but there was nothing to buy. Also, the place was falling apart, literally. I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street, balconies fall off buildings, one accident after another. And then there was this real kind of sense, even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope of the Gorbachev period, a real sense of the Soviet Union had lost its way. And of course, it was only a year or so after I left from that exchange program, and I already started with my degree program in Soviet Studies at Harvard, that the Soviet Union basically unraveled. And it really did unravel. It wasn't like it collapsed. It was basically that there were so many debates that Gorbachev had sparked off about how to reform the country, how to put it on a different path, that no one was in agreement. And it was basically all these fights and debates and disputes among the elites at the center, as well as basically a loss of faith in the system, in the periphery and among the general population that in fact pulled it apart. And of course, 1991, you get Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian Federation, then a constituent part of the Soviet Union, together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union, getting together and agreeing and essentially ending it, and Gorbachev. So basically, I'm there at the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation and thinking about the future, 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, if how many times the Soviet Union will 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, you know, 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 those are. That's. 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, you know, these kinds of conceptions that we have now, 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 our. 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 people would want to actually secede. Even in Texas, where I spend a lot of my time. Yeah, I. I just. I think that there is a common kind of pride of nation. You know, 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 Smuck together. There's a together there that.

I also feel that when I go around. Cause, I mean, I've spent a lot of time since I wrote my book in last October and this last year going around. I find the same feeling. But, you know, when I traveled around the Soviet Union back In the late 1980s, I didn't get any kind of sense that people wanted to see the end of the Soviet Union either. It was an elite project. There's a really great book called Collapse by Vladislav Zubuk, 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 that basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart. And there is a risk of that here as well, when you get partisan politics and people forgetting that they're Americans and they are all in this together, like a lot of the population thing. But they think that their own narrow, partisan ideological precepts count for more. And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also a power play 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, in the case of the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who then got rid of basically 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. And I spent a lot of time in Russia as well as in Ukraine and caucus, Central Asia and other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that 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 in ways that it certainly wasn't when I first came to the US 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 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 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.

And you take a lot of pride to this day of being nonpartisan. That said. So you served for the George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, always specializing in Eurasia and Russia. You were the top presidential advisor to President former President Donald Trump on Russia and Europe, and famously testified in his first impeachment trial in 2019, saying, I take great pride in the fact that I'm nonpartisan foreign policy expert. So given that context, what does nonpartisan mean to you?

Well, it means being very careful about not putting any kind of ideological lens on anything that I'm analyzing or looking at or saying about foreign policy, for one thing, but also not taking kind of one stance of one party over another either. To be honest, I've always found American politics somewhat confounding because both the Democratic and the Republican Party are pretty big tents. I mean, they're coalitions. In Europe, it's actually kind of in some respects, easier to navigate the parameters of political parties because you have quite clear platforms. There's also a longer history in many respects, obviously. I mean, there's a long history here in the United States as a development of the parties going back to the late 18th century. But in the United Kingdom, for example, in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties, it was quite easy to get a handle on. You know, at one point in the UK for example, the parties were real, genuine mass parties with people who were properly members and took part in regular meetings and paid dues. And you Know, it was easy to kind of see what they stood for. And the same in Europe. You know, when you look at France and in Germany and Western Germany, of course, Italy and elsewhere here in the United States, it's kind of pretty amorphous, you know, the fact that you could kind of register, you know, randomly, it seems to be a Democrat or Republican, like Trump did. At one point he's Democrat, next thing he's Republican. And then you kind of usurp a party apparatus. But you don't have to be. You're not vetted in any way. You're not kind of, you know, they don't check you out to see if you have ideological coherence. You know, you could have someone like Bernie Sanders on the other side on the left, you know, basically calling himself a socialist and, you know, running for the Democratic presidential nomination. So, kind of, in many respects, parties in the United States are much more loose movements. And I think you can. It's almost like a kind of an a la carte menu of different things that people can pick out. And it's more, over time, as I've noticed, become more like a kind of an affiliation, even with a sporting team. I mean, I get very shocked by the way that people say, well, I couldn't do this because that's my side and I couldn't do anything, and I couldn't support someone for the other side. I mean, I have a. A relative in my extended family here who is a, you know, died in the wool Republican. And on, you know, family holiday was a book on their table, said, 100 reasons for voting for a Democrat. And I said, hey, are you thinking of shifting party affiliation? Then I opened the book, and it's blank. It was pretty funny. I had to laugh. I thought, well, there you go. Then there's just. There's no way that, you know, people can pull themselves out of these frames. So for me, it's very important to have that independence of thought. I think you can be politically engaged on the issues, but basically without taking a stance that's defined by some ideology or some sense of partisan affiliation.

I think I tweeted about this, maybe not eloquently, and the statement, if I remember correctly, was something like, if you honestly can't find a good thing that Donald Trump did or a good thing that Joe Biden did, you're not. You're not thinking about ideas. You just pick the tribe. I mean, it was more eloquent than that, but it was basically, this is a really good test to see are you Actually thinking about, like, how to solve problems versus, like, your red team or blue team, like a sporting team. Can you find a good idea of Donald Trump's that you, like, if you're somebody who is against Donald Trump and, like, acknowledge it to yourself privately, oh, that's a good idea. I'm glad he said that.

Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions, which he often did, actually. I mean, obviously put them in a way that most of us wouldn't have done. But there was often kind of questions about, why is this happening? Why are we doing this? And, you know, we have to challenge ourselves all the time. So, yeah, actually, why are we doing that? And then you have to really inspect it and say whether it's actually worth continuing that way or they should be doing something differently now. He had a more kind of destructive quality to those kinds of questions. Maybe it's the real estate developer in him that was taking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of sacred edifices and things like that. But often, if you really paid attention, he was asking a valid set of questions about why do we continue to do things like this? Now, we didn't often have answers about what he was going to do in response, but those questions still had to be asked, and we shouldn't be just rejecting them, you know, out of turn.

And, you know, the, the, Another strength, the thing that people often that criticize Donald Trump will say is a weakness is his lack of civility can be a strength. Because I, I feel like sometimes bureaucracy functions on excessive civility. Like, actually, I've seen this. It's not just. It's bureaucracy in all forms. Like in tech companies as they grow, everybody kind of, you know, you're getting a pretty good salary. Everyone's, it's, everyone's comfortable, and there's a meeting and you discuss how to move stuff forward. And, like, you don't want to be the asshole in the room that says, why? This is. Why are we doing this this way? This is, this could be unethical. This is hurting the world. This is totally a dumb idea. Like, I mean, I could give specific examples that I have on my mind currently that are technical, but the point is, oftentimes the person that's needed in that room is an asshole. Yeah, that's why Steve Jobs worked. Elon Musk works. You have to roll in. That's what first principles thinking looks like.

The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name calling, you know, kind of inciting violence against you. Know the people that disagree with. So that was kind of your problem because, I mean, often one, you know, I, when I was in the administration, I had all of Europe in my portfolio, as well as Russia. And there were many times when we were dealing with our European colleagues where he was asking some pretty valid questions about, well, why should we do this if you're doing that? For example, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The United States has been opposed to Europe's reliance on gas and oil exports from Russia, the Soviet union, since the 70s and 80s. And Trump kept pushing this idea about, so why are we spending so much money on NATO and NATO defense? And we're all talking about this if you're then basically paying billions to Russia for gas. Isn't this contradictory? And of course it was, but it was the way that he did it. And I actually, one instance had a discussion with a European defense minister, basically said to me, look, he's saying exactly the same things as people said before him, including former Defense Secretary Gates. It's just the way he says it. So they took offense, and then as a result of that, they wouldn't take action because they took offense at what he said. So it was a kind of. Then a way of, could you find some other means of massaging this communication to make it effective? Which we would always try to focus on, because it's a kind of. It was the delivery, but the actual message was often spot on in those kinds of issues. I mean, he was actually highlighting, you know, these ridiculous discrepancies between what people said and what they actually did.

And it's the delivery. The charisma in the room, too. I'm also understanding the power of that of a leader. It's not just about what you do at a podium, but in a room with advisors, how you talk about stuff, how you convince other leaders.

Yeah, you don't do it through gratuitous insults and incitement to violence. That's one of the things you just. You don't get anywhere on that front.

Well, I mean, it's possible.

Tough measures and maximum pressure often, though, 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 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 US did not care one little bit about Ukraine. And it was just a game for Trump. It was personal game. He was basically trying to get Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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, because 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 Patashev, 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, 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. And actually he could, because what he was doing was ceding all this dissent and fueling already debates inside of US Politics. The kinds of things that we see just kind of coming out now, this kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden, that Ukraine was basically just trying to extract things from the United States, that Ukraine had somehow played inside of US Politics. Trump was convinced that the Ukrainians had done something against him, that they had intervened in the election. And that was kind of a combination of people around him trying to find an excuse as to kind of what had happened in the election to kind of divert attention away from Russia's interference in 2016 and the Russians themselves poisoning the well against Ukraine. So you had a kind of a confluence of circumstances there. And what I was trying to get across in that testimony was the national security imperative of basically getting our act together here and separating out what was going on in our domestic politics from what was happening in our national security and foreign policy. I mean, I think we contributed in that whole mess around the impeachment, but the whole parallel policies around Ukraine to the war that we now have that.

We'Re confronting, yes, signaling the value we place in peace and stability in that part of the world or the reverse by saying we don't care.

Yeah, we seem to not care. It was just a game.

But I mean the US role in that war is very complicated. One that's one, one that's one of the variables. Just on that testimony, did it in part break your heart that you had to testify essentially against the President of the United States or is that not how you saw?

I don't think I would describe it in that way. I think what I was, was deeply disappointed by what I saw happening in the American political space. I didn't expect it. Look, I was a starry eyed immigrant. I came to the United States with all of these expectations of what the place would be. I'd already been disabused of some of the, let's just say, rosy perspectives I heard in the United States. I'd been shocked by the depths of racial problems. Doesn't even sum up the problems we have in the United States. I mean, I couldn't get my head around it. When I first came, I mean, I'd read about slavery in American history, but I hadn't fully fathomed really the kind of the way that it was ripping apart the United States. When I'd read Alex's Tocqueville and he'd commented on this and it obviously hadn't kind of changed to the way that one would have expect all this time from the 18th century onwards. So that was kind of one thing that I realized. The civil rights movement and all of these acts of expansion of suffrage and everything else were imperfect at best. And I was born in 65, the same time as the Civil Rights act. And there's a heck of a long ways to go. So I wasn't, let's just say, as starry eyed about everything as I'd been before. But I really saw an incredible competence and professionalism in the US Government in the election system and the integrity of it. And I mean I really saw that. I saw that the United States was the gold standard for some of its institutions. And I worked in the National Intelligence Council and I'd seen the way that the United States had tried to address the problems that it faced in whole botched analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of honestly a crime in my view of invading Iraq. But the way that people were trying to, to deal with that in the aftermath, I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council and the dni, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong. In the whole analysis about Iraq in 2003, in the whole wake of people trying to pull together after 9, 11, and to learn all of the lessons from all of this. And I saw just really genuine striving and deliberation about what had gone wrong. What lessons could we learn from this? And then suddenly I found myself in this. I couldn't really describe any words. Totally crazy. Looking glass. Thinking of Alice in Wonderland, Alice through the Looking Glass version of American politics. I mean, I'd seen everything starting to unravel over a kind of a period of time before I'd been asked to be in the administration. But I did not expect it to be that bad. I honestly didn't. I mean, I'd been warned, you know, by people that this was, you know, kind of really a very serious turn that the United States had taken. But I really thought that national security would still be uppermost in people's minds. And it was when a lot of the people that I work with. But what I found, you know, if you want to use that, you know, term of heartbreaking, was the way in which all of these principles that I had really bought into and tried to uphold in the United States government and in the things that we were trying to do with me and my colleagues was just being thrown out the window. And I would have to step up in defense of them and in defense of my colleagues who were being lambasted and criticized and given death threats for actually standing up and doing their own.

Jobs, in particular on the topic of.

Ukraine, not just on Ukraine, but on national security overall. So, I mean, I'd gone through this whole period even before we got to that point. I'm seeing non partisan government officials being attacked from all sides, left and right, but especially the right, and being basically accused of being partisan hacks, you know, deep state coup plotters, you know, you name it. The patriotism being questioned as well. I know a lot of people I work with in government like myself, naturalized Americans, a lot of them are immigrants, many were refugees. Many people had fought in wars on behalf of the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan being blown up. And, you know, they put their lives on the line, they'd put their family lives on the line because they believed in America and they were reflections of Americans from all kinds of walks of life is what really made that cliche of America great. It wasn't. Whatever it was, it was being bandied around in these crude, crass political terms. It was just the strength of an incredible set of people who've come together from all kinds of places and decided that they're gonna make a go of it and that they're going to try to work towards the whole idea of the preamble of the Constitution, towards a more perfect union. And I saw people doing that every single day, despite all of the things that they could criticize about the United States, still believing in what they were doing and believing in the promise of the country, which is what I felt like. And then here we were, people were just treating it like a game and they were treating people like dirt and they were just playing games with people's lives. I mean, we all had death threats. People's whole careers, which were not just careers for their own self aggrandizement, but careers of public service trying to give something back, were being shattered. And I found, you know, I just thought to myself, I'm not going to let that happen because, you know, I've come from a. Well, are they going to send me back to Bishop Auckland in County Durham? Fine. I'm totally fine to go back, you know, because I could do something back there, but I'm not going to let this happen. I've made this choice to come to America. I'm all in. And these guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots and they're ruining us, you know, they're ruining it for everybody.

So the personal attacks on competent, hardworking, passionate people who have love for what they do in their heart. Similar stuff I've seen for virologists and biologists, so colleagues, basically scientists in the time of COVID when there's a bunch of cynicism and there was just personal attacks, including death threats on people that, you know, work on viruses. Work on.

Yeah. And they're going around, you know, basically with protective gear on in case somebody shoots them in the street. That's just absurd.

But let me zoom out from the individual people.

Yeah.

And actually look at the situations that we saw in the, in the George W. Bush, Obama and Donald Trump presidencies. And I'd like to sort of criticize.

Each.

By the, not the, the treatment of individual people, but by the results.

Right, Yeah, I think that's fair.

So if you look at George W. Bush and maybe you can give me insights, this is what's fascinating to me. When you have extremely competent, smart, hard working, well intentioned people, how do we as a system make mistakes in foreign policy? So the big mistake you can characterize in different ways, but in George W. Bush is invading Iraq or maybe how it was invaded or maybe how the Decision process was made to invade it again. Afghanistan with the. Maybe not the invasion, but details around, like having a plan about, you know, how to withdraw, all that kind of stuff. That Barack Obama, to me, similarly, is a man who came to fame early on for being somebody who was against a rare voice against the invasion of Iraq, which was actually a brave thing to do at that time. And nevertheless, I don't know the numbers, but I think he was the president for years over increased drone attacks, everything from a foreign policy perspective, the military industrial complex, that machine grew in power under him, not shrunk and did not withdraw from Afghanistan. And then with Donald Trump, the criticisms that you're presenting, sort of the personal attacks, the chaos, the partisanship of people that are supposed to be nonpartisan. So if you do sort of to steel, man, the chaos, to make the case for chaos, maybe we need to shake up the machine, throw a wrench into the engine, into the gears, and then every individual gear is going to be very upset with that because it's a wrench. It's an inefficient process, but maybe it leads for government. It forces the system as a whole, not the individuals, but the system, to reconsider how things are done. So obviously, all of those things, the actual results are not that impressive.

You could have done that on the latter, you know, shaking things up, because I'm all one for questioning and trying to shake things up as well and do things differently. Yes, but, you know, the question is, if you bring the whole system down with nothing, ideas of putting it to place. Look, I mean, I'm like many people. I've studied the Bolshevik Revolution and, you know, many others as well. And, you know, kind of what's, you know, what's the pattern here? You know, that actually fits into what you're talking about here is a kind of rigidity of thought on the part of revolutionaries in many cases as well. And also narcissism. In fact, I think it takes a pretty, you know, strong sense of yourself, you know, kind of an own yourself to want to be president of the United States. For example, we see that in many of our presidents have been narcissists to different kind of degrees. You think about Lenin, for example, and people can go back and read about Lenin. He formed his views when he was about 18, and he never shook them off, he never evolved. He didn't have any kind of diversity of thought. And when systems go awry, it's when they don't bring in different perspectives. And so Trump, if he brought in different perspectives and actually listened to them and not just believe that he himself knew better than anyone else and then tried to divide everybody against each other. It would have been a different matter. It's a tragedy of a completely and utterly lost set of opportunities because of the flaws in his own nature. Because, I mean, again, there was all kinds of things that he could have done to shake things up, and so many people around him remained completely disappointed. And, of course, he divided and pitted people against each other, creating so much factionalism in American politics that people have forgotten they're Americans. They think that they're red or blue parts of the teams. And, you know, if you go back over history, that's a kind of a recipe for war and, you know, internal conflict. You go back to, you know, the Byzantine Empire, for example. There's the famous episode of the Nika riots in Constantinople where the whole city gets trashed because the Greens, the reds, the blues, and these various sporting teams in the hippodrome get whipped up by political forces and they, you know, they pull the place apart. And that's, you know, kind of where we've been heading on some of these trajectories. But the other point is, when you look back, you know, at Bush and Obama as well, there's a very narrow circle of decision making. You know, in Bush, period, it's the focus on the executive branch, with Dick Cheney as the vice president being very fixated on it. In Obama, it's, you know, he. And, you know, kind of the bright young things around him, you know, from. He himself is, you know, kind of intellectually, you know, one might say arrogant in many respects. You know, he was very smart guy and, you know, he's convinced that he has. And he ruminates over a lot of things, but he's the person who makes a lot of decisions. And basically, George W. Bush used to call himself the decider as well. Right. I mean, they're all the people who make the decisions. It's not always as consultative as you might think it is. And for Trump, it's like I'm not listening to anybody at all. You know, it's just me and whatever it is that I've woken up today and I've decided to do so. I think, you know, the problem with all of our systems, why we don't get results is because we don't draw upon the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of people out there. You do that in science. All of my friends and relatives are in science. They've got these incredible collaborations with people across the world. I mean, how did we get to these vaccines for the COVID virus? Because of this incredible years of collaboration and of sharing results and sharing ideas, and our whole system has become ossified. We think about the congressional system, for example, as well. And there's this kind of rapid turnover that you have in Congress every two years. There's no incentive for people basically to work with others. They're constantly campaigning, they're constantly trying to appeal to whatever their base is. And they don't really care about. Some do of their constituents, but a lot of people don't. And the Senate, it's all kind of focused on the game of legislation first for so many people as well. Not focusing again on that kind of sense about what are we doing like scientists to kind of work together for the good of the country to push things along. And also our government also is siloed. There's not a lot of mechanisms for bringing people together. They ought to be. And things like the National Security Council, the National Intelligence Council actually did that quite successfully at times for analysis that I saw. But we don't have, we have it within the National Institutes of Health, but we saw the CDC breakdown on this kind of front. We don't have sufficient of those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds. You know, one of the other problems that we have with government, with the federal government over, you know, state and local government, is actually quite small. People think that the federal government's huge because of course, we're postal service and the military that are part of it. But your actual federal government employees is a very small number. And you know, the senior executive service part of that is the older white guys, you know, kind of come up all the way over the last several decades. We have a really hard time bringing in younger people into that kind of government service unless they're political hacks, you know, and want to, you know, kind of, or they're kind of looking for power and, you know, sort of influence. We have a hard time getting people like yourself and other, you know, younger people kind of coming in to make a career out of public service and also retaining them because, you know, people with incredible skills often get poached away into the private sector. And, you know, a lot of the people that I work with on the national security side are now at all kinds of, you know, high end political consultancies or they've gone to Silicon Valley and they've, they've gone to this place and that place because after a time, as a younger person they're not rising up particularly quickly because there's a pretty rigid way of looking at the, the hierarchies and the promotion schemes. And they're also getting lambasted by everybody. People like, you know, public servants. They're not really public servants. There's this whole lack and loss of a kind of a faith in public service. And you know, the last few years have really done a lot of damage. We need to revitalize our government system to get better results. We need to bring more people in, even if it's, you know, for a period of time, not just through expensive contracts for, you know, the big consulting companies and you know, other entities that do government work out there, but getting, you know, people in for a period of time, expending, expanding some of these management fellowships and the White House fellows and you know, bringing in, you know, scientists, you know, from the outside, giving, you know, that, that kind of opportunity for collaboration that we see in other spheres.

I think that's actually one of the biggest roles for President that for some reason during the election that's never talked about is how good are you at hiring? Yeah, and in creating a culture of like attracting the right. I mean basically chief hire. When you think of a CEO like the great CEOs are, maybe people don't talk about it that often, but they do more often for CEOs than they do for presidents is like, how good are you building a team?

Well, we make it really difficult because of the political process. I mean, and also because we have so many political appointments, we ought to have less, to be honest. I mean, if we look at other governments around the world that are smaller, it's much easier for them to hire people in. Some of the most successful governments are much smaller. And it's not that I say that the government is necessarily too big, but it's just thinking about each unit in a different way. We shouldn't be having so many political appointments. We should kind of find more professional appointments, more non partisan appointments. Because every single administration that we've had over the last, let's see, span of presidencies, they have jobs that are unfulfilled because they can't get their candidates through Congress and the Senate because of all the kind of political games that are being played. I know loads of people have just been held up because it's just on the whim of some member of Congress, even though that the actual position that they want is really technical and doesn't really care about what political preference they particularly have. So I think we have to try to look at the whole system of governments in the way that we would over other professional sectors and to try to think about this as just as you said there, that this is a government that's actually running our country, this is an operating system and you wouldn't operate it like that if you were looking at in any kind of rational way. It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan, tainted at every level anyway. So I would actually just say make a bid for a more non partisan approach to a lot of the parts of government you can still kind of bring in the political and premature. But also you have to explain to people writ large in America as well that this is your government and that actually you could also be part of this. Things like the Small Business Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, all these kind of things that actually people interact with but they don't even know it. The Postal Service, all of these things. I mean people actually, when you ask them about different functions of government, they have a lot of support, fit the National Park Service, you know, for example. It's just when you talk about government in an abstract way, like, oh yeah, too much bloated, you know, not efficient and effective. But if you kind of bring it down more to the kind of local and federal levels, that's kind of, you know, when people really see it. And if people could see kind of themselves reflected and many of the people have gone into public service, I think that they would, yeah, they have a lot more support for it.

More like superstars, like individuals that are like big on social media, big in the public eye and having fun with it and showing cool stuff that it's not. Because right now a lot of people see government as basically partisan warfare. And then it just, it makes it unpleasant to do the job. It makes it uninspiring for people looking in from outside about what's going on inside government, all of it, the whole thing. But you, you are, you know, just with all due respect, you're pretty rare individual in terms of nonpartisanship, like actually your whole life story, the, the, the humbling aspect of, of your upbringing and everything like that. Do you think it's possible to have a lot of nonpartisan experts in government? Like can you be a top presidential advisor on Russia for 10 years, for 15 years and remain nonpartisan?

I think you can. I don't think that's advisable though, by the way, because I mean, I don't think anybody should be there, you know.

So your first advice is to buy yourself after.

Well, well you should, you should, you should definitely have term limits, just like you should in everything, right? I mean, it's just like tenure in university. You're kind of like, yeah, you kind of. You know, we do, we have natural term limits, but, you know, you're kind of, you know, basically bottling it up for other people. I mean, what I'm trying to do now, I'm 57 now, and I always try to work with people from different generations. For me, just like, I've really benefited from these kind of mentorships of people who are older. You can mentor up and, well, and mentor down. I mean, I would try to get people from different backgrounds and different generations to work together in teams. Honestly, I'd like to more team networked kind of approach to things. The kind of things that you get again in science, right? I mean, all these ideas are going to come from all kinds of different perspectives. Age and experience does count for something, but, you know, fresh ideas and coming in and looking at a problem from a different perspective and seeing something that somebody else hasn't seen before. I mean, I just kind of love working in an environment with all kinds of different people and people who don't agree with you. You need people to take you on and say, absolute, that's crap. Where did you come up with that from? And I go, hang on. Well, explain to me why you think so. And then, you know, you have this kind of iterative process back and forth. I mean, I would always encourage my colleagues to tell me when they thought I was wrong. I mean, sometimes I didn't agree because I didn't see the, you know, the reasoning. But other times I'm like, they're right. You know, that was a complete mistake. I need to admit that. And, you know, kind of we need to figure out a different way of doing things. But the one point I do want to get across is there were a lot of people who were nonpartisan that I worked with. I mean, honestly, in most of the jobs that I had up until more recently, I had no idea about people's political affiliation. It's just when you get into this kind of highly charged partisan environment, they kind of force people to make decisions. And when you have one political party, a political faction that's trying to usurp power, it does make it quite difficult. I mean, that's the situation that we're in right now, and we're seeing some of the things happening I've seen and studied in other settings or seen for myself happening. When you have a president who wants to cling on to power, you've got to call that out. Is that a partisan act, or is that a kind of defense of that larger political system that you're part of? So I think we've got to recognize that even if you're not partisan, you can be politically engaged, and sometimes you just have to stand up there and speak out, which is what I did and what others did as well. None of those people who spoke out can initially saw that as a partisan act, even if some of them since then have decided to make political choices they hadn't made before because the situation actually forced people into taking sides. Very hard to still stay above the fray when you've got someone who's trying to perpetrate a coup.

Yeah, just to linger on that. I think it's hard and it's the courageous thing to do to criticize a president and not fall into partisanship after, because the whole world will assume if you criticize Donald Trump that you're clearly a Democrat. And so they will just. Everybody will criticize you for being a Democrat. And then so you're now stuck in that. So you're going to just embrace that role. But to still walk the nonpartisan route after the criticism, that's the hard road. So not let the criticisms break you into, you know, into a certain kind of ideological set of positions.

I mean, our political system needs revitalization. We need to be taking a long, hard look at ourselves here. And I think what people are calling out for, look, there's a vast swathe of the population like me who are unaffiliated. You know, maybe some lean in one direction over another. And unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views about things and political opinions. And, you know, you may sound quite extreme on, you know, some of those, you know, either from a left or right perspective, what people are looking for is a kind of an articulation, you know, things in a kind of a clear way that they can get a handle on. And they're also looking for representation. Somebody's going to be there for you. You're not part of a kind of a rigid team that you're excluded from. You're the ins and the outs. Look what people are looking at now, they're looking at that in the workplace because they're not finding that in politics. You're actually getting workers pushing. The people talk about the rise of the work, but people just saying, hang on a sec. The most important space that I'm in right now is my workplace, because that's where my benefits are from. They're not coming from the state. I mean, that's a peculiarity of the United States states system. You know, the Britain, you've got the National Health Service and you've got all the kind of national wide benefits. You know, you're not tethered to your employer like you are in the United States. But here, now we're asking people, you know, people are pushing for more representation. They're asking to be represented within their workplace. Be it Starbucks, where baristas are, you know, the Starbucks employees are trying to unionize. We have unions among our research assistants at the Brookings Institution where I am, you know, kind of teaching assistants in big universities doing the same kind of thing as well, because they won't have their voice heard. They want to kind of play a larger role and they want to have change. And they're often pushing their companies or the institutions they work for to make that change because they don't see it happening in the political sphere. It's not just enough to go out there and protest in the street, but if you want something to happen, that's why you're seeing big corporations playing a bigger role as well.

Yeah, and of course there's, you know, it's a longer discussion. There's also criticisms of that mechanisms of unions to achieve the giving of a voice to a people.

This goes back to my own experience growing up in Northern England. The Durham Miners that I was part of for generations, you know, first person in my family, not in the mines, on my dad's side, they created their own association. It wasn't a union per se at the very beginning. Later they became part of the National Miners Union. They lost their autonomy and independence as a result of that. But what they did was they pooled their resources, they set up their own parliament so they could all get together. Literally, they built a parliament. And it, you know, opened in like the same time as World War I and where they all got together because they didn't have the vote, they didn't have suffrage at the time because they didn't have any money, you know, so they didn't, couldn't pay the tax and they, you know, they couldn't run for parliament. And this is, you know, the kind of the origins of the organized labor parties later. But they create this association so they could talk about how they could deal with things of their own communities and have a voice in the things that mattered. You know, education, you know, improving their work conditions. It wasn't like what you think about some kind of like big political trade union with, you know, left wing, you know, kind of ideas. In fact, they actually tried to root out later, after the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union, even when they were still having ties with players like the minds of donbass in the 1920s, Trotskyites and, you know, kind of Leninists and, you know, communists, they were more focused on how to improve their own well being. You know, what they call the welfare. They had some welfare societies where they were kind of trying to think. And that's kind of what baristas in Starbucks want are workers in Amazon. They're talking about their own well being. It's not just about pay and work conditions. It's about what it means to be part of this larger entity. Because you're not feeling that same kind of connection to politics, you know, at the moment because you know you're being told by a representative, sorry, I don't represent you because you didn't vote for me. If you're not a Democrat, you're not a Republican, you're not red, you're not blue, you're not mine. And so people are saying, well, I'm in this workplace, this is kind of my collective. This is therefore this is where I'm going to have to try to push to make change. So this is kind of happening here and we have to realize that we've kind of gone in a way full circle back to that kind of period of the early emergence of mass labor. And that's where the political parties that we know today and you know, the kind of early unions came out of as well. This sort of feeling of a mass society, but where people weren't really able to get together and implement or push for change.

You know, with unions at a small scale and a local scale, it's like every good idea on a small scale can become a bad idea in a large scale.

On a large scale, yeah.

So like marriage is a beautiful thing, but at a large scale it becomes the marriage industrial complex that tries to make money off of it. Combined with the lawyers that try to make money off the divorce. It just becomes, there you go, caricature of a thing. Or like Christmas and the holidays. It's like, it's just, I, I don't.

Disagree, but what I'm saying is there's people, people are basically looking for something here. And you know, kind of, this is why, I mean, I myself am start to think about much more local kind of solutions to a lot of these kind of problems. It's again, the Teamed networked approach on.

The impeachment, looking back, because you're part of it, you get to experience it. Do you think they strengthened or weakened this nation?

I think it weakened in many respects just the way that it was conducted. I mean, there's a new book coming out by a couple of journalists in the Washington Post. I haven't actually seen it yet, but I really did, you know, kind of worry that myself, that it became a spectacle. And although it actually, I think in many respects was important in terms of an exercise of civic responsibility and, you know, give people a big, massive lesson in civics, everyone's kind of running out and looking up the whole process of impeachment and what that meant and kind of like congressional prerogatives. I was as well. I was, you know, like running off myself and, you know, trying to learn an enormous amount about it because I was in the middle of all of this, that it didn't ultimately show responsibility and accountability. And that in itself was kind of was weakened because on both sides there was a lot of parties on politics. I mean, I think that there was a dereliction of duty in many respects. I mean, especially, I have to say, on the part of Republican members of Congress who were kind of, they should have been embracing, you know, Congress's prerogatives. You could have, you know, kind of basically done this in a, in something of a different way. But the whole thing is because it was this larger atmosphere of polarized, not even polarized, but fractured, fractured politics. And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say, in many of the members of Congress on the Republican side, I mean, there's a lot of grandstanding that I really didn't like bit on the Democratic side either, and not admitting to mistakes and not kind of addressing head on the fact that they'd kind of been pushing for Trump to be impeached and talking about being an illegitimate president kind of right from the very beginning. And as a result of that, a lot of people just saw this as kind of a continuation of political games coming out of the 2016 election. But on the Republican side, it was just a game. There was people I knew who were, you know, basically, you know, one point, one of them winked at me. You know, in the middle of this, you know, kind of impeachment, it's just like, don't take this personally. You know, this is the game. This is a game. And I just thought, this isn't a game. And that's why I think that it, you know, kind of weakened because, I mean, again, on the outside. It weakened us. The whole process weakened us in the eyes of the world because again, the United States was the gold standard. And I do think, I mean, again, in the terms of the larger population, although a lot of people, you did actually see the system, you know, standing up, trying to do something to hold people account. But there still was that element of circus and a big political game and people being careless with the country.

But I do think that the Democrats were the instigators of the circus. So as it's perhaps subtle, but there's a. There's a different way. You talk about issues or concerns about accountability when you care about your country, when you love your country, when you love the ideals, and when you. Versus when you just want to win.

And stick it to the other side. I agree. I mean, there were people who I actually thought managed that, that made it about the country rather than about themselves.

Well, I guess there were others who did that.

Yeah, there were others who did a lot of grandstanding. Yeah. And that's another problem of our political incentive structures, that the kind of sense of accountability and responsibility tends to be personal. You know, people, whether people decide to do it or not, it's not institutional, if that makes sense. We've had a kind of a breakdown of that, kind of that sense. Now, I took an oath of office, and I'm assuming that most of them did too. You know, I had to be sworn in. You know, when I took those positions, I took that seriously. But I already took an oath of citizenship. There's, you know, presumably you did too. You know, you kind of study to become an American citizen. It's not something you take on lightly. And, you know, that's why I felt this deep sense of responsibility all the time, which is why I went into the administration in the first place. I mean, I got a lot of flack for it because, you know, I thought, well, look, I've been asked, and there's a real issue here. After the Russian interference and, you know, the whole influence operation in the 2016 elections and I knew what was going on and I should do something. If not me, then okay, someone else will go and do it. But can I live with myself just sitting on the sidelines and criticizing what people are doing and kind of worrying about this, or am I actually going to muck in there and just go and do something? It's like seeing your house on fire. And you see that, okay, this is pretty awful and dangerous, but I could go in there and do something to.

Clarify the house on fire, meaning the cyber war that's going on are cyber attacks or cybersecurity?

Well, in the 2016, when the Russians had interfered in the election, I mean, basically, this was a huge national security crisis, and our politics, we'd gone mad as a result of it. And in fact, we were making the situation worse. And I felt that I could kind of at the time, maybe I could do something here. I could try to clarify. I could work with others who I knew in the government, from previous stints in the government to push back against this and try to make sure it didn't happen again. And look, and I also didn't have this, you know, mad kind of crazy ideological view of Russia either. I mean, I knew the place. I knew the people. I've been studying a long time and quite calm about it. I don't take it personally. It's not kind of an extension of self. It's something I've spent a long time trying to understand for myself, going back to that very beginning of why were the Russians trying to blow us up? There must be an explanation. There was. It was a very complicated and complex explanation. It wasn't as simple as how it sounded. And also, there's a long tail to 2016. Putin's perceptions, the kind of things that he thought were going on the whole way, that what they did was actually fairly straightforward. They'd done this before in the Soviet period during the Cold War. Classic influence operation. It just had gone beyond the bounds of anything they could have anticipated because of social media and just a confluence of circumstances in the United States as well. We were very fragile and vulnerable. And I remember at one point having a discussion with the Russian ambassador where we were complaining about the Russian intervention. He said, are you telling me that the United States is a banana republic, that it's so vulnerable to these kinds of efforts? He actually looked genuinely mystified, although obviously was probably part of a kind of political shtick there. But he had a point. The United States had never been that vulnerable as it suddenly was in 2016. And in the time that I was in government and going back to what you asked about the whole impeachment and the whole exercise in Congress, that vulnerability was as stark as it ever could be. Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem as anything else. They were the kindling to all of the kind of the fires. Putin didn't start any of this other kind of problems domestically, just took advantage of them and, you know, basically added a bit of an accelerament here and there.

Yeah, the Interference. I mean, that's a much longer discussion because it's also, for me, technically fascinating. I've been playing with the idea of just launching like a million bots, but that are doing just positive stuff and just being kind.

Yeah. I always kind of wonder if, is it possible to do something on this skill that's positive? Because, you know, a lot of people seem to be able to use all of this for pretty negative effect. You've got to kind of hope that you could do this, use the same networks for the positive effect.

I think that's actually where a lot of the war, I think, from the original hackers to today, what gives people like me, and I think a lot of people that in the hacking community pleasure is to do something difficult, break through the systems and do the ethical thing.

Right.

So do the. Because if there's something broken about the system, you want to break through all the rules and do something that you know in your heart is the right thing to do. I mean, that's what Aaron Schwartz did with releasing journals and publications that were behind paywalls to the public.

Right.

And they committed. Yeah, but to me, it's fascinating because I, I, maybe you can actually educate me, but I felt that the Russian interference, in terms of social engineering, in terms of bots, all that kind of stuff, I feel like that was more used for political bickering than to actually understand the national security problem. Because I would like to know the actual numbers involved in the influence. I would like to. I mean, obviously, hopefully, people now understand that better that are trying to defend the national security of this country. But it just, it felt like, like, for example, if I launch one bot and then, and then just contact somebody at the New York Times saying, I launched this one bot, they'll just say, MIT scientist hacks, you know, they'll just. And then that spread.

But that's exactly what happened. It was, you know, kind of, I think that, you know, Putin and some of the people around him understood because, again, propaganda state, they spend an awful lot of time thinking about how you basically put out your own content and how you get maximum effect through performance. Putin himself is a political performance artist. I mean, Trump understood exactly the same thing. They were actually operating in parallel, not in collusion, but in parallel. Basically, Trump understood how to get lots of free airtime, you know, how to get himself at the center of attention. Putin, you know, did that through a kind of, I think, a less organic kind of way. You know, he had a lot of people working around him. I mean, that's the old, you know, Bolshevik agit prop and, you know, kind of then the whole Soviet propaganda machine and, you know, Putin kind of growing up in that kind of environment and having, you know, the kind of the Kremlin press office and all the kind of people around him, got kind of a massive machine, knew how that worked. I mean, they haven't done what the Chinese did in Russia, like blocking everything and having a big firewall. It was kind of putting out lots of content, getting into the, you know, the sort of center of attention. Trump's doing the same kind of thing. And the Russians understood that, you know, if you put a bit of things out there and then you call up the New York Times and people are going to run with it. And what they wanted was the perception that they had actually swayed the election. They loved it. This was the huge mistake of the Democrats and everything. I mean, I kept trying to push against this. No, they did not elect Donald Trump. Americans elected Donald Trump. And the Electoral College was a key part. Vladimir Putin didn't make that up. And basically, I also remember at one point the Russian ambassador talking to me about when we were doing the standard, here we are, we're lodging our complaint about the interference. He basically said, well, we didn't kind of invent Comey. And basically the decision to reopen, you know, Hillary Clinton's emails or, you know, kind of Anthony Weiner and, you know, kind of his, you know, emails on his computer. And I was like, yeah, he's right. I mean, you know, there were plenty of things in our own system that created chaos and tipped the election. Not, you know, kind of what the Russians did, but, you know, it's obviously easier to blame the Russians and blame yourself when, you know, things are kind of. Or those random forces and those random factors because people couldn't understand what had happened. In 2016, there was no hanging chads like 2000, where there was kind of a technical problem that actually ended up with the intervention of the Supreme Court. There was, pure and simple, the Electoral College at work and a candidate that nobody'd expected, including the Republicans in the primaries, to end up getting kind of elected or put forward different 2016, suddenly becoming the president. And they needed a meta explanation. It was much better to say Vladimir Putin had done it. And Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin guys were like, oh, my God. Yeah, fantastic. Champagne cocks popping. This is great. Our chaos agent. They knew they hadn't done it, but they'd love to take credit for it. And so the very fact that other people couldn't explain these complex dynamics to themselves. Basically dovetails beautifully with Vladimir Putin's attempts to be the kind of the Kremlin gremlin in the system. And he's basically was taking advantage of that forevermore. And I wanted to basically try to work with others to cut through that. And the thing is then people lost faith in the integrity of the election system because people were out there suggesting that the Russians had actually distort the elections. People written books about that. They said that they hacked the system when they were trying to hack our minds. But again, we were the fertile soul for this. I mean, we know this from Russian history, the role of the Bolsheviks, you know, the whole 1920s and 1930s with Stalin, their fellow travelers and the Socialist International. I mean, the Russians and the Soviets have been at this for years about kind of pulling kind of people along and into kind of a broader frame. But it didn't mean that they were influencing directly the politics of, of, of countries, you know, writ large. That plenty of interventions. It's just that we were somehow. It was, it was a confluence of events, a perfect storm. We were somehow exquisitely vulnerable because of things that we had done to ourselves. It was what Americans were doing to themselves that was the issue.

You think that's the bigger threat than large scale bot armies?

Those can be a threat. Obviously they do have an impact, but it's, it's how people process information. It's kind of like the lack of critical thinking. I'm just not on the Internet to that extent. I go looking for information. I'm not in social media. I'm in social media, but not by myself. You know, I don't put myself out there. I'm not. I haven't got a Twitter feed.

You don't have a Twitter one? Yeah, but there is a. There's one.

I have all kinds of strange things. It's Fiona Hill's cut, which I kind of like, you know, occasionally have people send things to me.

So many fans, it's hilarious.

But one the of what I try to do is just be really critical. I mean, my mum sends me stuff and I'm like, what is this? It's just, you know, your own mother can be as much of an agent of misinformation as, you know, kind of Vladimir Putin. I mean, we're all kind of, we all have to really think about what it is we're reading. There's one thing from my childhood that was really important to me and I always think every kid in school should have this. My next door Neighbor who was. He was actually very active in the Labour Party, and he was, you know, kind of really interested in the way that opinion, you know, shaped people's political views. And he was Welsh. He was a native Welsh speaker. So, you know, he was always trying to explore English and how, you know, there was kind of the reach of, you know, the English culture and, you know, kind of how it was kind of shaping the way that people thought. And he used to read every single newspaper, you know, from all the different spectrums, which was quite easy to do, you know, back in the 70s and 80s, because there weren't that many in the UK context. And every Sunday, he would get all the different Sunday papers from all the different kind of ideological vantage points. And then when I got to be a teenager, he'd invite me to look at them with him because he was my godfather, and he was just an incredible guy, and he was just super interesting and, you know, kind of culturally, you know, an outsider always kind of looking in. And he basically ran through, you know, what the Guardian looked at, the observer, the Daily Mail, the Sun, you know, kind of all of these, you know, the Telegraph, all of these newspapers, and how you could tell, you know, their different vantage points. And, of course, it's complicated to do that now. I mean, in this, you know, incredibly extensive media space, I look at what it is that they're saying, and then I try to, you know, read around it, and then, you know, look at what other people are saying and why they're saying it and who are they, what's their context. And that was kind of basically what I was taught to look at. And I think everybody should have that.

And certainly that's something that people in politics that are in charge of directing policy should. Should be doing. They should be not getting lost in. In the sort of the hysteria that can be created. Like, it does seem that the American system somehow not the political system, just. Humans love drama. Very good. Like the Hunter Biden laptop story. We. There's always like, one, two, three stories somehow that we just pick, that we're just gonna. This is the stuff we're gonna fight about for this election.

And everyone's got an opinion on it. Everybody. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's the most important, like Hillary Clinton's emails. Russians hacked the election.

Yeah. We had John Podesta's pasta recipes for a while, you know, that we were kind of all obsessing over, I don't know, people running out and trying them out, you know, something like that.

And there's fun. I Mean, there's all the best conspiracy theories about Giuliani. I just love it. We just pick a random story. Sometimes it's ridiculous and it detracts from.

What the larger question should be, which is about the family members of, you know, senior officials and whether they should be anywhere near any of the issues that they're. You know, there's ethics, there's government ethics and things there, you know, kind of across the board. But there's a bigger story in there. But that becomes a distraction. It's a look over there, you know, the oldest trick in the book, you know, kind of idea.

Yes.

Politicians are really good at that. Because it depends on the larger question. Because every single member of Congress and, you know, government official, their family should be nowhere near anything they're doing.

Well, that I could push back and disagree on. I. I mean, well, it depends on.

What they do, if they're making money out of it, you know, and kind of basically being in business is what I mean, you know, kind of. This is a. This is an issue. So it's not, you know, Hunter Biden on his own. It's, you know, kind of basically the kids of, you know, the Trump family, the, you know, you name it.

Yeah, in general like that. I just think it's funny, like, there's a lot of families that, you know, they work very closely together, do business together. It's very successful. I get very weird about that. Just feels like you're not. In fact, I don't even like hiring or working with friends initially. You make friends with the people you work with.

That's right. No, I have. I have the same worries as well, because it kind of clouds, you know, I would encourage, you know, my daughter to do something completely different.

Right.

Not going to the same field. Now, look, it's different if you're, you know, in science or, you know, mathematics or something like this and, you know, maybe, you know, kind of you've got a family member, you're kind of building on some of their theories and ideas. You know, if Albert Einstein had a, you know, kind of an offspring, it was in mathematics and took, you know, father's thinking, you know, further, that would be very different. But if it's, you know, kind of you're in business and other things, and it's just, you know, it's the nepotism problem that, you know, one has there.

Well, it says that, too, in a space of ideas.

Well, they do. If they're not, people aren't coming up and building on the ideas in a constructive way.

Right, but even for son, daughter of Einstein, you want to think outside the box of the previous.

Yeah, well, that's what I'm meaning. But I mean it's just. But they shouldn't be sort of told, no, sorry, you can't go and study math because, you know, or whatever, physics, you know, because of.

But a lot of that. You can't actually make it into law. Well, you could, I suppose, but honestly, if you do that kind of thing, you should just be transparent. There should be just an honesty about it.

It gets back to what I was talking about before. We need diversity of views and diversity of thinking and you can't have other things. It's like being partisan or rooting just for a team. If something is going to cloud your judgment or constrain the way you think about things and become kind of a barrier to moving on out. That's what we see in the system around Putin. It's kind of kleptocratic and it's, you know, it's filled with nepotism. All of the kind of like the people who you kind of see out there in prominent positions are the sons or daughters of including of Putin himself. I mean, that's when a system has degenerated and that's, you know, kind of. And I suppose in a way this is a symbol of the degeneration of the system, but again, it's just a diversion from, you know, kind of the bigger issues and bigger implications of things that we're discussing.

So critics on the left often use a straw man of tds, Trump derangement syndrome. Why does Donald Trump arouse so much emotion in people?

It's just the nature of the person. I mean, I don't feel particularly emotional about him. I mean, he's kind of a, he's a very flawed guy, to be honest. And this may seem bizarre. I felt sorry for him because this guy is so vulnerable, so wrapped up in himself that, I mean, he's just exquisitely open to manipulation. And I saw people taking advantage of him all the time. He has zero self awareness. I mean, I kept thinking to myself, my God, if this guy didn't have this entourage around him, how would he function? I mean, I felt sorry for us as well. I mean, that he ended up being our president because that should not have happened. I mean, in terms of character and in terms of fit for, fit for the job. Although I saw this, you know, kind of over a period of time, but I didn't feel, you know, kind of any, you know, sense of derangement. You know, kind of around him. He didn't drive me nuts in that way. I just became. I was just very worried about, you know, the kind of the impact that he was having on many particular issues.

Here's the important thing. So what I noticed with people that criticize Donald Trump is they get caught up in the momentum of it and they're unable to see. First of all, let's start with some ground truth, which is approximately half the country voted for the guy, Right?

Yep. And more voted in 2020 than voted in 2016 for it.

And I just feel like people don't load that in when they're.

Honestly, a lot of those people didn't vote for him and his personality and often could, because I know a lot of people who voted for him first time and second time, and they could disassociate all of the kind of features of Donald Trump that drives other people nuts from what they thought that, in actual fact, he could achieve. In terms of. It wasn't just this kind of sense about, well, I couldn't possibly vote for a Democrat. Sometimes it's just like, well, look, he shakes things up, and we need things to be shaken up.

And some people might have voted for personality.

This one, some of them did as well. But I'm just saying that not all of them did either.

Well, we don't know that data. That's the thing.

But, yeah, I can't say how much is. I'm just saying anecdotally, I know people who voted for me because he's him from the charisma and others who voted because he's shaking things up and he's keeping people on their toes and, you know, kind of we need that, you know, idea.

But the way to avoid Trump derangement syndrome, to me, me, as a doctor, I'm sort of prescribing to the patients on this syndrome. This issue is. I feel like you have to empathize with the people. You have to imagine in your mind all the different, like, strengths that the people who have voted for Donald Trump see and really understand it, really feel it. Like, walk around with it and then criticize. Like, I just feel like people get lost in this bubble of criticism in their own head. Forget, like, the tribe you're in or whatever. In their own head, they're not able to see. Like, half this country that we're a part of voted for the person. Same with Biden. Half the country voted for the guy. The people that are criticizing Biden, and they're doing this the way Biden is currently criticized is not based on policy. It's based on personal stuff, similar to Trump.

Yeah, I know it is. I mean, that's what people do. Look, I think part of that is, I mean, look, first of all, I want to say I completely agree with you about understanding where people are coming from. And I think it's very important for people to listen to other people and their views. I try to do that all the time, try to learn from that. You know, I mean, everybody's got a perspective and a context. We all live in a certain context. We're all living in history. Our own personal histories matter a lot. And also the larger context and environment in which we're living in and where we live and who we live with and, you know, the kinds of lives that we lead as well, those are all extraordinarily important. I mean, I know that from, you know, myself. Everything, you know, that I've done in my life has been shaped by where I came from, who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things. You can't take yourself out of that. I mean, you can do it in some, you know, like a science or something else, but, you know, still, your own views and maybe some of the ideas that you have in pursuing experiment might have been shaped by your larger context, you know, depending on what it is that you work on. But the other thing is the nature of the political system. The presidential election is like a personality contest, a beauty contest. It's like a kind of a referendum on, you know, one person or another. It's kind of like what we see in Russia, honestly, with Putin or not Putin or Putin and Putin before. It's all about Putin. And what do you think about Putin? It's not about what a president should be doing and kind of what their policies are. That's kind of the bizarreness of the US Political system. Look, we've just seen this happening in the United Kingdom. You've got this core of a couple of hundred thousand, rather, people in the Conservative Party have just voted for, you know, three leaders in a row. The rest of the country isn't. And they're just looking at, you know, whether they like that personality and, you know, what they say to them rather than what they're necessarily going to do for the country, I mean, which is, you know, kind of pretty absurd. And I mean, again, the presidency is a weird hybrid in the United States. You know, we were talking before about it's the person who should be running the country to the chief executive or the prime Minister in another setting. But we don't think of it like that. You know, we often think about whether we like the guy or not or, you know, we'd like to hang out with him all the time. You know, one of my younger relatives, and I said, so, why did you vote for Trump? He said, well, he was great. It was funny. I went to his rallies. I got, you know, all kind of charged up. And I said, could you see yourself voting for Biden? No, he's too old. And I said, well, you know, he's only just a little bit, you know, kind of older than Trump, or he's, you know, the same age as your grandma. Do you think your grandma's old? Oh, no, not at all. But it's just this kind of perception. He's boring, you know, so there's people are actually sometimes, you know, basically being, you know, kind of motivated by just a feeling, you know, kind of that kind of sense, because that's the sort of nature of the, you know, the presidency. It's this kind of how you feel about yourself as an American or how you feel about the country writ large. The kind of the symbol of the state. Look, you know, in Britain, you had, you know, Queen Elizabeth ii, and everybody, you know, seemed to, for the most part, not everyone, I guess, but most people respected her as a person, as a personality, as a kind of symbol of the state. Even if they actually didn't really like the institution of the monarchy. There was something kind of about that particular personality that you were able to kind of relate to in that context. But in the United States, we've got all of that rolled into one. The head of state, the symbol of the state, the kind of queen, the king, the kind of idea, the chief executive, the kind of prime ministerial role, and then the commander in chief of the military. It's all things kind of at once. But ultimately, for a lot of people, it's just how you feel about that person. Oh, I couldn't cover up for them because of this, or I couldn't vote for them because of that. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton actually did win the election in terms of the popular vote. So it wasn't that kind of people wouldn't vote for a woman. I mean, more people voted for her on the popular level, not obviously through the Electoral College, in the Electoral College vote. So it wasn't just gender or something like that, but it was an awful lot of things. For people found Trump attractive because he was sticking up the big middle finger to the establishment. He's an Anti establishment change character. There was a lot of people voted for Barack Obama for the same reason and voted for Trump. We know that phenomenon. What was the 11, 12% of people, so they could vote for some completely, totally different, radically different people because of that sort of sense of change and charisma. I mean, I had people who I knew voted for Trump, but would have voted for Obama again if he'd run again, because they just like the way that he spoke. They liked the way that, you know, because they said, I mean, this is all my anecdotal things do it about. One of my relatives said I could listen to Obama all day, every day. I just love the way he sounded, I love the way he looked. You know, I just like the whole thing about him. And then say about Trump, well, he was exciting, he was interesting. You know, he was kind of like, you know, whipping it up there, you know, so there's this just this kind of feeling, you know, we always say about, you know, could you have a beer with this person? And people, people decide they couldn't have one with Pelver Clinton and 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, 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 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 not about the platforms, it's more about the person.

Yeah. And picking one side and like sticking with your person. Really. Like a sport 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, 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 looked at the first couple of terms of his presidency, I think on the overall ledger, he 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 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 from the 2000s onwards, 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 really started to build the country back up again domestically. And the first couple of terms, again putting Chechnya to one side, which little hard because there was a lot of atrocities. And I have to say that he was pretty involved in all of that because the fsb, which he'd headed previously, was in charge of wrapping up Chechnya. And it created kind of a very strange system of fealty, almost a feudal system, in the kind of relationship between Putin at the top and Kadyrov in Chechnya. And there was quite a lot of distortions kind of as a result of that, in the way that the Russian Federation was run, a lot more of an emphasis on the security services, for example. But there was a lot of pragmatism, opening up the country for business, basically extending relationships. I would say that by the end of those first couple of terms of Putin, Russians were living their best lives. There was a lot of opportunity for people. People's labor was being paid for. They weren't being taxed. The taxes were coming out of the extractive industries. There was kind of, I guess, a sense of much more political pluralism. It wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Olson 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 a kind of a different phase emerging. And part of it is the larger international environment where Putin himself has become kind of convinced that the United States is out to. 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 the whole idea of the global financial system and that Russia was prospering and that Russia, part of the G8 and actually could be genuinely one of the major economic and financial powers. And then suddenly he realizes that the west is incompetent, that we totally had 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, in this kind of period. But then 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 2011, 2012. And after that, he goes into kind of a much more sort of focused role where he sees the United States as a big, 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 inter 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 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, he's 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 I've written about Putin that 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 just 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, at the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great kata of the 20th century, but also the collapse of the Russian empire before it. And he starts to be critical about Lenin, 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 Putin been good for Russia or not? And this is where we get into the focal point of. 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, that period in anybody's professional and political life that if you stay around long enough, people get a bit sick of you. We talked about that before. Should you stay in any job for a long period of time? You need refreshing. And Putin is starting to look like he's going to be there forever, and people are not happy about that and would like their chance as well to move on and move up. And with him instilling players, that's not going to be particularly possible. And that, you know, it's around the time when he starts to make that decision of annexing Crimea, and that's when the whole thing flips. In my view, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 is the beginning of the end of Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia. Because if you pay very close attention to his speech on the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014, you see all of the foreshadowing of where we are now. It's already of kind of his view of his obsessions, his historical obsessions, his view of himself has been kind of fused with the state, a kind of a modern czar. And his idea that the west is out to get him, and it becomes after that, almost a kind of like a messianic mission to turn things in a different direction.

And who are the key people to you in. In this evolution of the human being, of the leader? Is it Petrushev? Is it Shoigu, the minister of defense? Is it, like you mentioned, Peskov, the press secretary? What role does some of the others, like Lavrov, play?

I think it's more rooted in the larger context. I mean, individuals matter in that context, but it's kind of like this shared worldview. And if you go back to the early 1990s, immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Yeltsin, you know, and his counterparts in Ukraine, Belarus, pull it apart, there was an awful lot of people who, you know, wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, not just Putin. I mean, you remember after Gorbachev tried to have the New Union Treaty in 1991, and there was the emergency committee set up the coup against Gorbachev, it was because they were worrying he was going too far and unraveling, you know, the union then as well. They were opposed to his reforms. There's always been a kind of a very strong nationalist contingent. They become Russian nationalists over time rather than Soviet hardliners who basically want to maintain the empire, the union, in some form. 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 Mayor Luchov, for example, in Moscow, by other forces in the Russian Duma, not just Vladimir Zhirinovsky and others, but really serious, what we would call him right wing nationalist forces. But it's 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 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 people like Sergey Kuryenko, I knew Kuryenko back in the 90s. I mean, my God, that guy's all in. Or like Dmitry Medvedev, who was a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin, certainly had a totally different perspective, wasn't in the kgb.

Did you say warmer, fuzzier version?

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 looks so rigid and stiff that he looks like he might implode. I mean, that wasn't how he was earlier in his career, and he 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 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 Patrushevs and Botnikovs and others, and Sergey 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. So there's a lot of enablers, a lot of power seekers, and there are a lot of people who think the same as him as well. He is a man of his times, a man of his context.

You, as a top adviser yourself and a scholar of Putin, do you think actually now, in his inner circle, are there people he trusts?

There are people he trusts for some things, but I don't think there's people he trusts for everything. I don't think he's the kind of person who tells anyone everything at all. I don't think he's got some deeply. No, I think he compartmentalizes things. He's often said that the only person he trusts is himself, and I think that's probably true. He's the kind of person who keeps his own counsel. I mean, people talk about Kovalchuk, for example, or kind of some of the other people who are friends with him that kind of go back to his time in St. Petersburg at various points. He seemed to spend a lot of time, way back when, talking to people who were. People think of kind of more moderating forces, like Alexei Kudrin, but it doesn't seem to be interacting, you know, with them. You know, there are obviously aspects of his personal life. You know, does he speak to his daughters? Does he, you know, speak to, you know, kind of lovers, you know, kind of, in a way, people speculate about, you know, kind of who might he confide in. But I would greatly doubt that he would have deep political discussions with them. He's a very guarded, very careful person.

What about sources of information, then? So trust a deep understanding about military strategies for certain conflicts like the war in Ukraine or even special subsets of the war in Ukraine or any kind of military operations, getting clear information, deeply.

Suspicious of people and of information. And I think part of the problems that we see With Putin now. I mean, I've come from isolation during COVID I mean, I'm really convinced that, like many of us, a lot of Putin's views have hardened and the way that he looks at the world have been shadowed in very dark ways by the experience of this pandemic. Obviously, he was in a bubble, different kind of bubble than most of us. I mean, most of us are not bubbles with multiple kind of palaces and kind of the Kremlin. But, you know, we've seen, you know, so much. Obviously, a lot of this is staged, that isolation, you know, they're kind of making it very clear that he's the czar, the guy who is in charge, making all the decisions, you know, one end of the table and everybody else is at the other end. But, you know, it's very difficult then to bring, you know, information to him in that way. He used to have a lot of information bundled for him in the old days by the presidential administration. I mean, I know that because it was a lot more open in the past. And I have a lot of meetings with, you know, people in the presidential administration who brought outside, you know, would say all source information, you know, for him and, you know, kind of funneled in information from different think tanks and, you know, different viewpoints and maybe a kind of more eclectic, diversified set of information. He would meet with people, you know, you've heard all the stories about where he had once called up Masha Gessen, you know, and had to, you know, come in, you know, obviously a, you know, a very different character as a journalist and a critic. We've heard about Benedictive from Echo Moskvi, the radio program, the editor who Putin would talk to and consult with. He'd reach out people like ljmyn Alekseva, for example, the head of Memorial. He had some respect for her and would sometimes just talk to her, for example. All of that seems to have come to a halt. And I think a lot of us worry, I mean, us who watch Putin about what kind of information is he getting? Is it just information he's seeking and gathering himself that fits into his worldview and his framework? We're all guilty of that, of looking for things, gets about social media preferences. Are people just bringing to him things that they think he wants to hear, like the algorithm, kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard? Or is he himself in a tapping into source of information that he absolutely wants? And remember, he is not a military guy. He's an operative. And he was sort of trained in operations and Contingency planning. Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, as a civil engineer, was the former minister of emergencies. He wasn't a military planner, somebody like Gerasimov, the head of the Chiefs of Staff, maybe a military guy, in this case from the Army. But he's also somebody who's in a different part, the chain of command. He's not somebody who would spontaneously start telling Putin things. And Putin comes out of the fsb, out of the KGB of the Soviet era, and he knows the way that intelligence gets filtered and works. He's probably somebody who wants to consume raw intelligence. He doesn't probably want to hear anybody else's analysis. And he thrived in the past of picking things up from people. You know, I've taken part in all of these meetings with him gone for hours, because he's just collecting. He's collecting information. He's sussing people out. He wants to know the questions they ask. He learns something about the questions that people ask, the way that they ask them. You know, so he's kind of soliciting information himself. And if he's cut off from that information, you know, because of circumstances, then, you know, how is he formulating things in his head? And again, getting into. You can't get into his head, but you can understand the context in which he's operating. And that's where you worry, because he clearly made this decision to invade Ukraine behind the back of most of his security establishment.

You think so?

Oh, I think it's pretty apparent what.

Would the security establishment, what would be the.

Well, that would be the larger, you know, thinking, the funneling in information from the presidential administration, from the National Security Council. It looks like, you know, he made that decision. Decision with a handful of people, and then, you know, having worked in these kinds of environments, and it's not that dissimilar. You filter information up. So think about, you know, you and I are talking for hours here. If you were my, you know, basically, you know, senior official and I'm your briefer, I might only get 20 minutes with you, and you might be just like, you know, looking at your watch the whole time and thinking, hang on a second, I've got to go. And I've got this meeting and I've got that meeting. And. Yeah, your point? You're not going to wait there. So I give this long explanation. I've got to get to the point, and then I've got to then choose for myself what's the information I'm going to impart to you out of the 20 things that I think are important. You know, okay, I've got 20 minutes. Maybe I only get two minutes. Maybe you get called out and somebody kind of interrupts. Something happens. I'm going to get one minute, two minutes. I mean, I once remember I had to give a presentation when I was in government. It's too real to Henry Kissinger, you know, for that Defense Policy Board. And we planned bloody weeks on this thing. You know, PowerPoints were created, teams of people were brought together and, you know, people were practicing this. We had all these, you know, different people there. And I said, look, Henry Kissinger is an academic and former professor. And, you know, I happen to, you know, going to watch Jim in action, he's going to like, you know, five seconds in, if we, if we're lucky, we get that far, ask us a question and just throw off our entire presentation. What is it that we want to convey? And that's exactly what happened. And then, you know, people aren't really prepared what they wanted to convey. And they, you know, they prepared a, you know, a nice sort of fulsome, you know, PowerPoint like approach. We never even got there. And so God knows what, you know, he took away from it at the end of it. And that's, you know, think about Putin. He's going to be kind of impatient. He's, you know, we see the televised things where he, you know, kind of sits at a table a bit like, you know, people won't necessarily see us here. And he puts his hands on the table and he looks across at the person who says, so tell me, you know, what's the main things I need to know? And of course, the person's mind probably goes blank, you know, with the kind of, the thought of, like, oh, God, what's the main thing? Yeah, and they go, they start, well, Vladimir Vladimirovich, they start the kind of. They're revving up to get to the point, and then he cuts them off. So you think about that and then you think about, well, what information has he got? And then how does he process it? And is he suspicious of it? Does he not believe it? And what inside of his own history then leads him to make one judgment over another? He clearly thought the Ukrainians would fall apart in five seconds.

We don't know if he clearly thought that, but that there was a high probability maybe.

Oh, I think he pretty much thought it, because I think he thought that Zelenskyy wasn't very popular. There was an awful lot of, you know, pro Russian sentiment in whatever way he thinks that is because people have Russian speakers and that, you know, they're kind of, you know, in polling they're, you know, they expressed affinity with Russia. I mean, certainly in Crimea that worked out because a majority of the population had, you know, higher sentiments of feelings of affinity with Russia. And you know, obviously, you know, that, that kind of, they got traction there. But it's more complicated. We talked about Donbass before, about being a kind of melting pot. When they tried the same thing in Donbass, Donetsk and Luhansk, because it tried in Crimea in 2014, didn't kind of pan out. In fact, a whole war broke out. They tried to kind of in many of the major cities that are now under attack, including Odessa, to kind of ferment pro Russian movements. And they completely and utterly fell apart. So Putin was thinking, you know, I'm pretty sure based on polling and the FSB having infiltrated, you know, an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchies we're now seeing is quite parent with some of the dismissals in Ukraine. He was pretty sure that, you know, kind of he would get traction and that it would be like 1956 in Hungary or 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Remember, he comes out of the Andropov Levy, as it's called, a kind of cohort of people who come into the KGB under Yuri Andropov. And Yuri Andropov has presided over a lot of these anti dissident kind of movements inside of Russia itself and how you suppress opposition, but also over how you deal with kind of the uprisings in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And there's all these lessons from this that you can put everything back in the box. And yeah, there might be a bit of violence and a bit of fighting, but ultimately you think you've got the political figures and you decapitate the opposition. So they thought Zelensky would run away, Yanukovych run away, but that was kind of a bit sort of a different set of circumstances. And they thought that all of the local governments would kind of capitulate because they had enough Russians and inverted commas in there again, mistaking language and kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity or how people would react in the time are not understanding people's, you know, linkages and, you know, kind of importance of place, the way that people feel about who they are in a certain set of circumstances.

But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is unlike anything that he was ever involved with.

So I don't think he thought it would be, you know, because it's kind of if he looks back into the past. You're right though. He wasn't involved in 68 or 56 or what happened in the 1980s in Poland.

But there's a very wide front and it's the capital. And I mean, this isn't going.

This isn't Chechnya. This isn't, you know, kind of Syria or for example, this is a major.

Nation, exactly like a law. It's large.

The size, it was more like Afghanistan. But they didn't realize that because again, Ukrainians are us. There's this kind of inability to think that people might think differently and might want to something different. And that 30 years of independence actually has an impact on people and their psyches. And if I look back to the 1990s, I mean, I remember being in seminars in, at Harvard at the time and we were doing a lot of research on, you know, what was happening in, you know, the former Soviet Union at the time. Because the early 1990s, just after the, you know, the whole place fell apart and there was already under Yeltsin, this kind of idea of Russians abroad, Russians in the near abroad, Russian speakers and the need to bring them back in. And I remember we had seminars at the time where we talked about at some point there'd be some people in Russia that would actually believe that those Russian speakers needed to be brought back into Russia, but that the people who spoke Russia might have moved on because they certainly had other opportunities in other windows in the world. I mean, look what's happened in Scotland, for example, mosquitoes. People in Scotland speak English. The Scottish language is not the standard bearer of Scottish identity. There's just, it's almost a civic identity, different identity than not just national identity, just like you see in Ukraine. And there's lots of English people that moved to Scotland and now think of themselves as Scottish or Brazilians or Italians and you know, all kinds of people who've moved in there. I mean, it's a smaller population, obviously it's not the scale of Ukraine. But you know, people feel differently and there's been a devolution of power. And when Brexit happened, you know, Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all. And they wanted to kind of still be, you know, having a window on Europe. And that's kind of historic. And lots of people in Ukraine have looked west, not east. You know, it depends on where you are. Not not just in Lviv, you know, or somewhere like that, but also in Kyiv and Kharkiv, you know, was kind of predominantly Russian speaking city But Kharkiv was also the center of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian literature. You know, at different points, people have different views. I grew up in the north of England. We don't feel like the south of England. There's been a massive divide between north and southern England for millennia, not just centuries. So, you know, people feel differently depending on where they live and, you know, kind of where they grew up. And Putin just didn't see that. He didn't see that.

Well, hold on a second. Let me sort of push back at the fact that I don't think any of this is obvious. So first of all, Zelensky, before the war was unpopular.

Oh, he was, what was it, 38%, something like that, at best, in the popularity. Yeah.

Let me sort of make the case that the calculation here is very difficult. If you were to poll every citizen of Ukraine and ask them, what do you think happens if Russia invades? Just like actually each put each individual Ukrainian in a one on one meeting with Putin and say, what do you think happens? I honestly think most of them will say they will agree with a prediction that the government would flee, it would collapse, and the country won't unite around the cause because of the factions, because of all the different parties involved, because of the unpopularity.

You might have said the same thing about the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded in 1941. You see, the problem is Putin always reads history from one perspective over another. I think most countries basically rise to their own defense. So this is actually one of the first times that Russia has been on the offensive rather than on the defensive. So there's kind of a bit of a flip there. I mean, obviously Afghanistan, but, you know, that was more complicated because it was. But it was also supposed to be an intervention, right? I mean, it wasn't supposed to be to annex Afghanistan. It was to try to prop up, you know, kind of or reinstall, you know, a leader there. Syria, you were in there to, you know, help your guy, Bashar Al Assad, turn away the opposition. Chechnya was a debacle. The Chechens fought back big time. And it was only by dint of horrible violent persistence and ruthlessness and nasty dirty tricks that kind of Putin prevailed there. And then you wonder, did he prevail? Because what happened? Chechnya sometimes describes the most independent part of the Russian Federation. And Ramzan Kadyrov plays power games in Moscow. His predecessors, even his father and others wouldn't have done that. Ahmed Khadirov and before that, Dudaev and Moskhadov I mean, they were willing to make a compromise, but they wouldn't have had the same position that Khadydev has had. So I think that, again, it's your perspective and where you stand and which bit of history you start to read. And that's why I say that I think Putin, again, it's the information, the way that he processes it. I think most Russians also can't believe that they've done something wrong in Ukraine. I mean, maybe at this point, things are changing a bit, but that's why there was, you know, so much kind of support for this in the right way. I mean, I have Russian friends again who said, but look what was happening in Donetsk. Look what was, you know, the Ukrainians were doing to our guys. You know, look what was happening to Russian speakers. You know, we were defenders. We were not, you know, we're not invaders. I think, you know, again, the special military operation, you know, idea now, I think it's flipping, obviously in the way that with the war going on there. But Putin wasn't, you know, kind of looking at what would happen. I mean, most of the kind of glory parts of Russian history, when you kind of go in, you know, you chase Napoleon back to Paris or you chase the Germans back to Berlin, you put the flag above the Reichstag. That's a very different set of affairs. When you've been fighting a defensive one, you've been invaded from a war where you invade someone else. And even the most fractured populations, like you had in the Soviet Union at the point rally round. And World War I fell apart. I mean, the tsar didn't manage to rally everybody around. I mean, the whole thing fell apart. And World War II, Stalin had to revive nationalism, including in the republics in Central Asia and elsewhere, to revive nationalism. And Ukraine suddenly found nationalism. You know, the kind of sense of.

That's really interesting because it's not. It's not obvious, especially what Ukrainians went through in the 1930s. It's not obvious that, that. I mean, my grandfather was Ukrainian and he was proud to fight a Ukrainian Jew. He was proud to fight and willing to die for his country.

It wasn't like his country then was the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union. Right, sorry, clarify.

But he might fight now for his country, Ukraine.

Yes, but it. I'm just like, lingering. And the point you made, it was not obvious that that united feeling would be there.

No. And again, it wouldn't have been obvious for the Soviet Union.

That's. Sorry.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Sorry. I was referring to my grandfather with the Soviet Union, we're both saying the exact same thing.

Yeah, no, yeah, we are.

We're saying it's a really powerful thing. Because I take it. Because you take history as it happened, you don't realize it could have happened differently. It's kind of. It's fascinating.

It's that whole counterfactual. Right, yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, if you. If you've kind of. That's. That's why we all need in the United States to really examine our own history because, you know, there's a lot of lessons from that that, you know, we. We should treat very cautiously. It doesn't mean that, you know, history repeats or even rhymes, you know, the old axiom all the time, but there are a lot of things that you can take away differently from putting a different perspective in a different slant on the same set of events. I mean, I always used to wonder, like, how many books can be written on the French Revolution or even on the Russian Revolution. You know, I studied with Richard Pipes. I remember he was really offended after he'd written his Grip Magnus opus on the Russian Revolution, two volumes. Other people would, you know, kind of write about the Russian Revolution. So I've written it all, and I thought, well, actually, maybe you haven't. It's like there might be some completely different angle there that you haven't really thought of. And that's Putin. You know, I remember Peskov saying, putin reads history all the time, Russian history. And I thought, well, maybe you should read some world history. You know, maybe he should kind of read some European authors on Russian history, not just, you know, reading La Manosse for, you know, Russian historians on Russian history. Because you might see something from a very different perspective. Look, in the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam, right? I mean, they saw Vietnam as kind of weak, manipulated by, you know, kind of external forces. China, Soviet Union, but the Vietnamese fought for their own country. They suddenly became Vietnamese, and Ho Chi Minh became, you know, basically a kind of a wartime fighter and leader, you know, in a way that, you know, perhaps people wouldn't have understood either.

You said United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam. And that for some reason, sprung a thought in my head as United States, since World War II, had anything that's not a mistake in terms of military operations abroad, I suppose all the ones that are successes we don't even know about, probably. So it's like very fast military operations.

I mean, career is divided. I mean, I don't know what's successful, but you know, kind of, I mean, there was a solution found that, you know, some people are promoting, you know, in this case as well, of a sort of division and a, you know, the DMZ and, you know, one side over the other and, you know, kind of perpetuating a division, which I think is particularly successful. But if you think About World War I and World War II, the United States came in, you know, under some very specific sets of circumstances. In World War I, they did kind of come in to help, you know, kind of liberate, you know, parts of Europe, France and, you know, kind of assist the UK and, you know, everything else. Great Britain in the war, towards the end of it, World War II, you know, there was that whole debate about whether the United States should even be part of the war. I mean, we know it wasn't fought to overturn the Holocaust and all of the kind of things you kind of wish it would been fought for, but it was because of Pearl harbor and, you know, the Japanese pulling in. But ultimately it was easy to explain why you were there. You know, particularly after Pearl harbor and what had happened. It was harder to explain Vietnam and Korea and, you know, many other wasn't. Look, that's kind of going to be a problem for Putin. That's why there is a problem for Putin. All of his explanations have been questioned. You know, started off on NATO or this or that or the other, and, you know, kind of all liberating, you know, Ukraine from Nazis or, you know, kind of basically stopping the persecution of Russian speakers. And all of this has now got lost in just this horrific destruction. And that's what happened in Vietnam as well. It became, you know, a great degradation of the Russian military with atrocities and people wondering why on earth the United States was in Vietnam. I mean, even that kind of happened in Britain in the colonial, you know, kind of pivot as well. Why was the United Kingdom doing, you know, committing atrocities and, you know, kind of basically fighting these colonial wars? Northern Ireland? Why was the United Kingdom still, you know, kind of militarily occupying Ireland, Cyprus? There's all kinds of, you know, instances where we look at this thing. So because what Russia is doing now, Putin is trying to occupy another country, irrespective of, you know, kind of the historical linkages and, you know, the kind of the larger meta narratives that he's trying to put forward there.

What role did the United States play in the lead up and the actual invasion of Ukraine by Russia? A lot of people say that. I mean, obviously Vladimir Putin says that part of the Reason the invasion had to happen is because of security concerns over the expansion of NATO. And there is a lot of people that say that this was provoked by NATO. Do you think there's some legitimacy to that case?

Look, I think the whole situation here is very complicated and you have to take a much longer view than, you know, what happened in 2008 with the Open door for Ukraine and Georgia, which actually, by the way, I thought was a strategic blunder, just to be very clear, because there wasn't any kind of thinking through about what the implications of that would be and what it actually would mean for Ukraine's security. And also bearing in mind what Putin had already said about NATO expansion, it came on the wake of the recognition by the United States pretty unilaterally of Kosovo. And it also comes in the wake of, I mentioned before the invasion of Iraq, which really is very important for understanding Putin's psyche. So I think we have to go back much further than. It's not just talking about kind of NATO and what that means. NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine going in a different direction from Russia, just as so is the European Union. Remember, the annexation of Crimea comes after Ukraine has sought an association agreement with the European Union, not with NATO at that particular point, even though, you know, the EU on the security, common security defense policy basically has all kinds of connections with NATO, various different levels in European security front. It was all about Europe and going on a different economic and political and ultimately legal path. Because if you have an association agreement, eventually you get into the aqui communitaire and it just transforms the country completely. And Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet period or the Russian Empire period. It becomes, you know, on a different trajectory, like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, another country. It becomes a different place. It moves into a different space. And that's part of it. But if you go back again to the period at the very beginning of the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where there's no discussion about NATO at that point and NATO enlargement, there is a lot of pressure, again, as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine, trying to bring it back in the fold and wanting to make what was then, you know, this mechanism for divorce, more of a mechanism for remarriage, Commonwealth of independent states. And in the early 1990s, when Ukraine became an independent state, it inherited that nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union. Basically, whatever was stationed oppositioned in Ukrainian territory at the time became Ukraine's strategic and, you know, kind of basically Intermediate and tactical nuclear weapons. And, you know, in the United States at the time, you know, we had all this panic about what was going to happen with all of that. I mean, I think, you know, it was a scientist and, you know, kind of technically it would have been difficult for Ukraine to actually use this. I mean, the targeting was, you know, done centrally. They were actually stationed there. But nonetheless, Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan, suddenly become nuclear powers. And, you know, Ash Carter, the former US Defense Equity, just died tragically in. Dave was talking about, you know, talking together today was part of a whole team of Americans and others who, you know, tried to work with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to get them to give up the nuclear weapons. And back in the early period of that 93, 94, you go back and I mean, I was writing about this at the time. I wrote a report called Back in the ussr which is, you know, kind of on the website of the Kennedy School with some other colleagues. And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations coming out of Moscow, the Defense Ministry and the Duma, the parliament and others that Ukraine was trying to find a way of making a dirty bomb using its nuclear weapons, you know, becoming a menace. And, you know, kind of Ukraine might have to be brought to order. So a lot of the dynamics we're seeing now were happening then, irrespective of NATO. Basically the problem was always Ukraine getting away. Yeltsin himself, when he unraveled the Soviet Union didn't really want it to unravel, but he didn't have the wherewithal to bring the countries back again. Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its economy imploded. It had to give sovereignty to all of these constituent parts of the Russian Federation in terms of a sort of devolution of authority. It had the war in Chechnya, which Yeltsin stupidly sparked off in 1994. You had Tatastan, one of the regions, the Ulrich region, you know, basically wresting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow. You had. The whole place was kind of seemed like it was falling apart so that, you know, you couldn't do anything on Ukraine because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it. And then when, you know, kind of basically Russia starts to get its act back together again, all of these security nationalist types who had never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova or anywhere else to kind of move away, they didn't worry that much about Central Asia, to be frank, but they know they did want, you know, the core states, in their view, come Back, and Moldova was part of that, even though it's not Slavic. But they wanted Belarus and northern Kazakhstan and probably Kazakhstan as well, which wasn't really thought about being as part of Central Asia back in the fold, as close as possible. So anything that gave those countries an alternative was seen as negative. It could have been an association with China of them joining an association with Latin America or Africa or something else like that. But of course, NATO has all of those larger connotations of it being, you know, the Cold War opposing entity. And Putin has always seen NATO as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact, which is, in other words, just something dominated completely by the United States. Now, that, of course, is my getting back to Trump again. Trump was always going, you know, to the Europeans, if this is really supposed to be collective security in a mutual defense pact, why are you guys not paying? You know, why does the US States pay for everything? But, you know, NATO was actually conceived as collective defense, you know, mutual security. And it was set up by, you know, the United States, along with the UK And France and, you know, Germany and Turkey and, you know, other countries. And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden, they didn't have to join NATO. They didn't want to join NATO for a long time. They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel and the other countries partner with NATO. But once they thought that their security was really at risk, they wanted to be part of it. And so you're now really seeing that NATO is something other than just being a creature or an instrument of the United States. But that's how Putin always saw it. So what this debate about NATO is all about, or Russia being provoked is wanting to kind of return to an old superpower bipolar relationship where everything is negotiated with the United States States. It's to try to deny that Ukraine or Belarus, well, Belarus has been absorbed by this point, you know, by Russia or Moldova or Kazakhstan or any of the other countries have any kind of agency, not even Poland or Hungary or, you know, kind of France and Britain. For years and years and years, senior people like Putin and people around the Kremlin have demanded a return to the kind of what they call the old Concert of Europe or the Concert of Vienna, where the big guys, which now means the United States and Russia, just sit down and thrash everything out. And so, I mean, Putin, by saying, look, it was provoked. It's the United States, it's NATO, it's a proxy war, or it's this or it's that or this is going to be A nuclear confrontation. It's like the Cuban Missile Crisis, it's the Euro Missile Crisis. It's basically just saying, I want to go back to when the Soviet Union and the United States worked things out. I want to go back to the whole, you know, period of the 1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan just kind of got together and figured things out, or even better, back to Yalta, Potsdam and Tehran and the big meetings at the end of World War II where we resolved the whole future security. We've had a war, we've had the Cold War. Now we've got another war, we've got a real war, hot war. We've got a war in Ukraine. It should be the United States and Russia that sought this out. So this is where we see the United States States waffling about as well, trying to kind of like figure out how to handle this, because it has to be handled in a way that Ukraine has agency. Because if Ukraine doesn't have agency, nobody else has agency either. Nobody else has any kind of decision making power. And you know, we have an environment in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players. There's the United States and Russia and China and maybe occasionally might be India and perhaps Brazil or some other South Africa or some other country like maybe the brics some point. But you know, ultimately it's like the old days. Big powers resolve everything. And so this war is also about Russia's right, Putin's right, you know, to determine things, you know, strongman to strongman, big country to big country and, you know, determine, you know, where things happen next. That's why he's talking about things being provoked and it's being the United States fault.

But aren't there parts of the United States establishment that likes that kind of three party view of the world?

Oh, there's always going to be people who like that part, that, that approach. Of course there is, but then they don't necessarily dominate. That's the kind of thing that people kind of think about. I mean, you know, Putin can, you know, read all the various articles and hear the kind of pronouncements of people. But you know, this gets back to, you know, the way that the United States operates. Putin saw that Trump wanted to have a top down vertical of power and other presidents have wanted to have that. But the United States is a pretty messy place and we have all kinds of different viewpoints. Now, of course we know that in Russia, everything, even criticism, the Kremlin is usually fairly orchestrated, usually to kind of flesh out what People think about things. When we had these hardliners saying we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less, and that the army wasn't doing enough, it was, in many respects, kind of encouraged by the Kremlin to see how people would react to that, to kind of actually create a constituency for being more ruthless than you had before because they wanted to clamp down in the United States. I can say whatever I want. It doesn't mean that I'm speaking on behalf of the White House. And even if I have been an advisor to this president, that president and the other, doesn't mean I'm basically speaking on behalf of. Of the US Government. But there's kind of always an assumption from the Russians that when people say this and people do advocate one thing or over another, that they're. It's operating. There's a lot of mirror imaging. Think of it. We're operating in the same kind of way. So, yes, there are, of course, constituencies who think like that and would love it. It'd be back to that. And there are many people out there with their own peace plans. All kinds of people out there trying to push this.

There does seem to be. The engine of the military industrial complex seems to give some fuel to the hawks, and they seem to create momentum in government.

Yeah, but other people do, too. I mean, there's always, you know, kind of a checks.

I mean, again, you believe in the tension of ideas.

I think there is a lot of tension. I mean, I've seen it. I've seen it inside of the government now, you know, and people can push back, and that's why I speak out and I try to lay it out so that everybody can kind of figure out for themselves. I said the same to you. As I say to everybody, this is how I see the situation, and this is how we can analyze it here. Now, look, do I think that we've handled the whole Russia account for years? Well, no, we haven't. We've taken our eyes off the ball many times. We've failed to understand the way that people like Putin think. You talked earlier about we need to have empathy for all the people who like Trump or like Biden, and somehow they think. We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does. You know, he has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context. We've got to understand that. We've got to Understand that he would take offense or something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessarily to blame by taking actions, but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly or take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something.

So you've been in the room with Putin. Let me ask you for some advice. And it's also just a good philosophical question. For you or for me. If I have a conversation with Vladimir Putin right now, can you advise on what questions, topics, ideas to talk through to him as a leader, to him as a human, what would you like to understand about his mind, about his thinking?

Yeah, remember what I said before, that Putin always tries to reverse things. He wants to hear the questions that people have. Because, remember, he himself at different points, has been a recruiter, which is the way that you're operating now as well. Right. You're asking an awful lot of questions. Your questions also betrayed, you know, often the times where you're thinking about things, you know, the kind of context, you know, kind of any kind of dialogue like this reveals a lot about the, you know, the other person.

Yeah.

And I've actually often, you know, noticed in these settings that Putin likes to have a lot of give and take. So I think he would actually enjoy having a conversation, you know, with you. But again, he would always be trying to influence you, inform an influence that's kind of, you know, part of the way that he always operates. So what you would have to, you know, be trying to think about, so what is it you would want to elicit information from him? You're trying to understand the guy's worldview. And what we're trying to also understand is if there's any room there where he might compromise on something, you know, so if your goal was to go in there, you know, to talk about Ukraine at this particular moment, I mean, one of the problems that I've often seen in the sort of the meetings we've had with Putin just ends up in sort of mutual recriminations, you know, kind of. No, well, what about what you've done? Or no, you've done that about, you know, and there's always this, what about ism? I mean, you often say, well, you're saying that I've done this, but you've done that. The United States invaded Iraq. What's the difference between, you know, what I'm doing and all of the things that you've been doing here? I mean, what you would have to try to do is kind of elicit information about why or what he is thinking about this particular moment in time and why he thinks it.

Yeah, the whataboutism is a, is a failure case. I think that shows, from all the interviews I've seen that with him, that just shows that he doesn't trust the person on the other side.

No, he doesn't.

Right. But I, I, I'm not cynical like people's. They seem to think he's some kind of KGB agent that doesn't trust anybody. I disagree. I think everybody's human, and from my perspective, I'm worried about what I've seen is, I think whether it's Covid, whether it's other aspects that I'm not aware of leading up to the invasion. He seems to be less willing to have charismatic back and forth, dialogue.

Yeah. An open discussion. You know, actually, I, you know, I said, you asked me before about, you know, that issue of trust, and he often says he only trusts himself. And I said, you know, he's often, you know, distrustful of people, but he does trust some people for certain things where he knows it's within their competence.

Yeah.

So he has people he trusts to do things because, you know, he knows they'll do them, and he knows that they'll do them well, which is why, you know, he has his, you know, old buddies from, you know, St. Petersburg, because he's known for a very long time, and he knows that they won't, you know, try to pull a fast one over him. But he also knows their strengths and their weaknesses and what they can be trusted to do. I mean, he's learning that, you know, some of the people in the military that he, you know, thought were competent or people on other things are not. Right. That they're. And he tends to actually have a lot of loyalty to people as well. Or he also kind of thinks it's best to keep him inside the tent than outside. And he moves them around, you know, he kind of. Okay, you know, he gives them multiple chances to redeem themselves. If they don't, it's not like he has them done in. I mean, yeah, there is a lot of that in the system, but the people that he's worked with for a long time, you know, he moves them around to something else, perhaps where they can do less harm. Although, you know, we've often seen that he has quite a small cadre of people that he's reliant on, and often, you know, they're not up to the task, which is kind of what's happening here. But he also, in the past, has been more straightforward, just like you were saying here, more pragmatic. And I think, you know, if you engaged with him in Russian while you're actually literally speaking the same language, because there's so much lost in translation, I used to jump outside up my skin listening to some of the phone calls because, you know, the way that they kind of relate, you know, with an interpreter.

Oh, because you're listening to the translation?

No, because I know I'm listening to the Russian and the translation and the translation, you know, in real time. And having. Being at a translators institute is really difficult. Look, an interpreters are trained in the moment to do something, you know, the synchronipy, the synchronous, the synchronized or the real time translation. So translation is an art as well as a skill. If you're doing simultaneous translation, that's the word in English, you know, synchrony, perivod in Russian, you're kind of focused in the moment on the fragments of the discussion, trying to render it as accurately as you possibly can. And when you come out of that, you can't relay the entire conversation. And often what translators do is they take this little shorthand note like journalists do, and afterwards, they've just been caught up in the moment and they haven't got the big picture. Consecutive. Translation is different, kind of. You're trying to convey the whole mood of big chunks of dialogue that have already been there. But sometimes you might not get that right either, and it breaks up the flow of the discussion.

That's terrible.

And often it's, you know, the kind of, the person who translates, it's different. You know, some of our best translators are women, but, you know, hearing a woman's voice, you know, translating a guy who has a particular guy's way of speaking and a macho way of speaking and a crude way of speaking, you know, be that Putin or. I've seen that happen with Erdogan, the president of Turkey, you know, and it gets translated by a much more refined, you know, female speaker. You've just lost the whole thing. And, you know, many of the translators on the Russian side are not competent in English in the way that you would hope they are. They're not. It's not just that they're not native speakers. They're just not trained to the same high standards they used to be in the past.

Yes.

And you just got. You lose the nuance, you lose the feel, you know, you almost need, you know, Kind of the interpretive actor doing the kind of the interpretation for, like, you need to match it as much as you can in the way that you do voiceovers in film. The best way to talk to Putin is one on one in his own language. I mean, I have a really great friend here who is one of the best interpreters of Putin. He's often asked by the media to interpret for him. He was at the institute that I was. I mean, I know him from that kind of period and he is just excellent. Just like Pavel Palashenko was absolutely phenomenal at interpreting Gorbachev. Now, he didn't always interpret him accurately because Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaffes and sometimes was, you know, Gorbachev himself would joke that Palashenko, you know, spoke better for Gorbachev than Gorbachev could himself. But Putin is actually quite precise and careful in the way that he speaks because there's a lot of menace sometimes to things deliberately. Other times there's lots of humor and he's telling a joke for a particular reason. And all of it is. I mean, he actually uses the richness of the Russian language and the crudity of language that can't be conveyed in English.

Facial expressions.

Yeah, facial expressions. Body language. The way that he sits back in the chair and slouches. The, the kind of, the way that he makes fun of people and he, you know, kind of uses irony. Just some of it is just lost and it needs to be conveyed.

The depth of humor and wit. I've met quite a few, like, political leaders like that in the. Speak only Russian. When I was traveling in Ukraine, I. I don't know how you translate that. I think it's almost the other person that reminds me like that a little bit is Obama.

There's.

Obama had a wit and an intelligence, but like a. He would smile as he said something that add a lot to it, like, like that he's trolling you or he's being sarcastic or like, I don't it me converting into words. It's obvious that all English speakers, if they listen to Obama, but if you had to translate to a different language, I think you're going to lose a lot of that.

Yeah, I mean, when I watched the. I mean, I watched many of Putin's speeches, you know, kind of just in Russian, not looking at any of the, you know, the subtitles or anything. And it's just watching the way that his body language is at the, at the time when he's saying things the way that you smoke, he'll sneer, he'll laugh, he'll, he'll ad lib kind of from something that obviously kind of, you know, wasn't there on the prepared speech. And it's really critical and, you know, kind of a lot some people speak, like Trump, it just needs kind of just words. Putin, the words are very important. Trump, it's the atmosphere, it's the kind of the way you feel about things. It's the buzz you get, it's revving people up, it's the kind of slogans. And Putin is, you know, he's conveying a lot in what he's saying there, I think.

I mean, of course, I don't know much because I only speak Russian and English, but I have, in English or Russian, have not met almost anyone ever as interesting in conversation as Putin. I think he shines not in speeches, but in interactions with others.

Yeah. When you watch those interviews and things with him, and I've been at many of these sessions, it's been hours of him parrying questions. And it's like watching a boxer sparring at a kind of training bout. Yeah, come on, give me another one. You know, and it's kind of like. And he prides himself and he's made mistakes often, but the breadth of, you know, the issues that he's often covered has been interested, has been fascinating. And I used to just take, you know, kind of really detailed notes about this because you learn a ton. But it's also about his worldview again. I mean, he does live in a certain box, like we all do. And, you know, again, his world experience is not as extensive as, you know, you would hope it would be. But that's why you have to really pay attention. That's where we've messed up. That's where we haven't really paid a lot of attention to what he's been saying. He's been telegraphing this grievance, this dissatisfaction, this I'm going to do something for years.

And the thing is, during war time, the. Combined with propaganda and the narratives of resentment and grievance that you dig in on those. Like maybe you start out not believing it, but you're sure it's all going to believe it eventually.

Well, you convince yourself over time. Yeah. Look, the longer you're in a position like Putin, 22 years now, come up on 23 years, could be out there for 36 years, you become more and more rigid. I mean, this is again, you know, something that you see in history. You know, you look at, you know, people through history have moved from kind of being kind of left wing and, you know, in the perspectives to hard right, they kind of have a kind of a sort of an ossification or a rigidity emerges in their views. I mean, again, I used to have these arguments with Professor Pyce about Lenin because he would talk about Lennon, but he didn't change his mind from being 18. Have you not thought about that? I mean, it's like we're not formed, fully formed individuals at 18. You know, we don't know anything. We know something, but not everything. I mean, and obviously the younger context, you know, the kind of. The way that you kind of grow up, the place you grew up, the things that happen to you, the traumas you have, I mean, all of these have an impact. But then if you don't grow beyond all of that. And Putin's been stuck in place since 2000 when he became president. He's not out and about, you know, kind of being a man of the people. You know, he, you know, he's not doing the kind of things he used to do. Yeah, he gets out there and he goes to Kazakhstan and, you know, kind of Tajikistan, and he goes to China and he does this not. And then to Covid, he didn't go anywhere. I mean, very few places. And so he got. He's got stuck. And that worries me a lot because you could see before that he, you know, had a bit more of flexibility of thought, and that's why nobody should be in place forever. You should always kind of like get out there and go out there and learn a new skill, you know, kind of. You need some. He needs to sort of, you know, he needed to get out more and do something different.

You had an interesting point you've made that both Vladimir Zelinsky and Putin are thinking about. They're just politicians. They're thinking about the 2024 election, which is coming up for both of them.

Yeah, I've said that in some of the other interviews. Yeah, that's true.

That's so interesting.

I mean, because their election is going to be pretty much at the same.

Time as the US Election also.

Oh, those will be before. I mean, because it's sometime in that, you know, early part of the year for the presidential election.

Yeah. And also, I don't know if you know about US Elections, but they actually last way longer than we're in it.

Now, aren't we, you know, already.

Already starting. So there's going to be a significant overlap.

Yeah. You know, do you think that actually.

Comes into play in their calculus I.

Think it was one of the reasons why Putin invaded in February 2022, because it was gonna be two years. I mean, he thought it'd be over by March of 2022. And he got two years to prepare for, you know, the election. And he got a big boost. You know, not only he got a boost from Crimea. I mean, I didn't mention that before. I mean, one of the reasons for invading Crimea and annexing or invading Ukraine the first time annexing Crimea was, look what happened to his ratings. They went from kind of declining, and they were still pretty good, you know, by anybody's standards, to just rocketing off into the stratosphere. I mean, I didn't really meet anybody in Russia who thought that annexing Crimea was, you know, kind of a bad thing. I mean, even, you know, kind of people who oppose Putin on so many other things. Crimea was, you know, Kim Nash, they kept saying, you know, this is kind of, you know, we got it back. You know, it should never have gone away. It was ours, you know, but, you know, this is more complex. And he wasn't, I don't think, at the time planning on annexing all of Ukraine. When he went in this special military operation, he was going to try to turn it into what Belarus has become, you know, part of a, you know, bring back the Commonwealth of Independent States or the Union, then a new union with Belarus and Ukraine and Russia over time, but certainly remove Ukraine as a major factor, independent factor on the world stage, and consolidate Crimea and maybe kind of incorporate Donetsk, Luhansk. That was also a possibility. But it wasn't in his intention, in any case, to have something on this kind of scale. He wanted to get on with then preparing for what was going to be, he would think, the cakewalk, the shoe in of the next presidential election. I mean, last time around, he had to invite into a bit of competition with this person who's reputed to be his goddaughter, Ksenia Sobchak, you know, for a bit of, you know, kind of entertainment for people, you know, this next time around, you know, maybe he wasn't really planning on running, you know, against any other, you know, serious opposition. He was just going to have the acclaim of, you know, the kind of the. The great leader, like President Xi in China. You know, Putin, you know, was basically, I think, you know, he also hoped that he would be able to devolve some authority away, you know, kind of. So he's more like the, you know, the supreme leader kind of figure the tsar, like, figure the monarch, and then you know, other people get on with the chief executive, prime ministerial running the country, and he could kind of like, step back and just enjoy this. You know, maybe there was going to be again, a new union of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in some fashion, and he would preside over that.

So, speaking of opposition, you've criticized the famed Putin critic, Alexei Navalny. What's the nature of your criticism?

Well, it hasn't really been a kind of a criticism in the way that people have implied, but more just reminding people that Navalny isn't some stooge of the west as other people have kind of depicted him in the Russian firmament, saying that this is kind of he's pro Western, he's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. In the past, he's articulated things are not so dissimilar from some of the people around Putin. And it's more just reminding people that, you know, just because you kind of see somebody, you know, as a kind of in an opposition figure or somebody who might be more palatable from, you know, your perspective, looking from the west, they're not always going to be, you know, what you think they are. Alex Navalny is a Russian, and, you know, in a particular Russian context, he's different from Putin, but he wouldn't necessarily, you know, kind of run, you know, the Russian system in ways that we will like. So that's kind of, it's not a kind of a criticism. It's more of a critique of the way that we look at things. You know, I think it's a mistake to always, you know, say, oh, this is pro Western or this is a, you know, liberal. I mean, what the heck does that mean, pro Western? I mean, he's a Russian. He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. And he's often, you know, been, you know, quite critical about immigration. He's had some negative views about, you know, one point, remember, he said, don't feed the caucuses. You know, kind of played upon some of the, you know, the racial and ethnic tensions inside of, you know, Russia itself as well. Now. He is a pluralist and he's kind of. And he wants to have, you know, a different set of political actors there. But he also isn't promoting revolution. He's not Lenin. He's not wanting to bring down the state. He wants to kind of, you know, change the people who are in charge. That's what he's being basically focused on. And, you know, he might have and have things undo things that we elsewhere might not like.

And I guess the Bigger picture there is. It's not trivial to know that if you place another human in power to replace the current human in power, that things are going to be better. They could be a lot worse because there's a momentum to a system. A system is bigger than just its leader, even when that leader has a huge amount of power.

That's absolutely right. And, you know, he grew up in that, you know, same system. Now he's younger than Putin, so he's got a different generational perspective. And he's not wedded to the Soviet Union or, you know, kind of some concept of the Russian empire. Doesn't seem to spend a lot of time. I don't know what he's doing, you know, in jail, but he's probably not sitting around, you know, reading Lomonosov and, you know, the kind of. The great kind of tracks of Russian history could be, actually. But, I mean, I think, you know, Navalny has a different worldview and a different perspective, just like Medvedev was different, you know, in his time in presidency and made some, you know, changes and some innovations there. But don't think that they're going to be radically different, because, look, Gorbachev, I mean, he was so different from Andropov and Chinenko and others as a person, but he was also constrained by the system. And he wanted to have change, but he wanted evolutionary change. He didn't know how to do it, but he didn't want to bring the whole system down. Look at Khrushchev when he came in, you know, after that whole period of, you know, everybody trying to figure out what to do after Stalin had died and there was all this kind of back and forth. And eventually Khrushchev emerges and, you know, he tries to make changes in the system, but he's also a creature of a very specific context. He's grown up in the same system, and he kind of brings all kinds of elements of chaos there to the whole thing and, you know, gets into a standoff of the United States that we know as the Cuban Missile Crisis and eventually gets removed. We're looking at what's happening in the United Kingdom right now. They've just churned through three prime ministers and actually five prime ministers in kind of as many years. But all of those prime ministers have come out of the context of the Conservative Party. They're all kind of just shades of the same thing. They've all come out of the same academic and kind of privileged backgrounds. Even Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister, who's the first you know, Indian or Anglo Indian Prime Minister in British history, it was a kind of phenomenal, you know, kind of as a child of an Indian immigrants, but also a person of great privilege, from the same academic and party background as the others, you know, so there are always differences with those human beings, but those contexts matter a lot.

What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon?

Well, Putin's definitely been thinking about it, right? I mean, he is the kind of person, if he's got an instrument, he wants to figure out how to use it. We look at polonium, we look at novichok, we look at all kinds of things that he's also presided over in Syria, he has put in charge of the war in Ukraine. Now General Severikin is known as General Armageddon, the kind of person who pretty much facilitated the use of chemical weapons in Syria, for example. So don't think that Putin hasn't thought about how ruthless he can possibly be. The question is really the calculation. It's his estimation of the probability that it will get the desired effect. We keep talking about this idea of escalate to de. Escalate. That's not what the Russians, how they call it, but it's the whole idea that you do something really outrageous to get everybody else to back off. Now, when you talked about the precedent that the United States set of detonating the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, what, you know, he obviously meant the precedent of using nuclear weapons, of course, which of course we would then say, well, we showed then how the impermissibility of ever doing that again. But what he's talking about is the precedent of escalating to such an extent that you stop the war. Because he reads that saying, well, you know, the US Dropped the bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The war was brought to a quick conclusion. And of course, there's a huge debate in America about whether it was necessary to do that, whether the war was ending anyway. Did that really, you know, kind of change the minds of the Japanese high command? I mean, there's all kinds of books being written about that. And of course, you know, the revulsion that people felt in the work of that was just, you know, just the shock of what actually happened. And we've spent, you know, 70 years, you know, basically coming to terms with the fact that we did something like that. You know, the firebombing. You know, we've also looked at all the bombing, you know, in Vietnam and everywhere, and, you know, the, the. All these massive bombing campaigns and realizing they actually often had the opposite effect. Hiroshima, Nagasaki might have contributed, and there's a lot of, you know, scholarship suggesting it did to the end of the war. But a lot of the big bombing campaigns, the destruction, actually prolonged wars because they made people fight back, as we're kind of seeing in the case of Ukraine. So Putin has to calculate the probability that if he uses some tactical nuclear weapon, that it will get the desired effect, which is get us to capitulate and Ukraine to capitulate, us to capitulate, meaning the United States and Europeans not supporting Ukraine anymore, pushing towards the negotiating table, negotiating Ukraine away, and Ukraine saying, okay, we give up, like happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or in Japan. So it's his calculation, you know, as much as anything else, which is really important. He said we have to show him that he won't get that out of it. It's kind of less our probability and, you know, kind of the odds of it. It's just how he calculates that probability of getting what he wants.

I mean, I guess that's how the game of poker works. It's your. Your probability and your estimate of their probability and your estimate of their estimate of your probability and so on.

And so it goes on. Yeah, exactly.

I think he has two tools, right? So one is the actual. The actual use of nuclear weapons. And then the threat of the.

Oh, the threat is very effective.

And the more real you make the threat.

That's right.

The more you approach the actual use. Like get very close to using, already.

Using Chernobyl, Zaporizhzhia, and then Yuzhnou Krainsk, the other nuclear reactor. So he's using civilian nuclear reactors as a dirty bomb. So, you know, it's ironic that he has Sergey Shoigu, his defense minister, calling people up and say Ukraine's are going to use a dirty bomb. They're already doing it. I mean, what is kind of more destructive than stirring up all the radioactive dust and Chernobyl as you send your troops through, for example, or shelling the Chernobyl plant in the sarcophagus and putting it at risk? And Zaporizhzhia. And you've got the International Atomic Energy Agency running out there in utter panic and kind of also trying to intervene in the conflict. So you're putting civilian nuclear reactors at risk. I mean, that also has the great added effect of cutting off Ukraine's power supply, because Zaporizhzhia in particular was opposite a third of Ukraine's power generation or some really high percentage. I'd have to go back and take a look at that. But that's a twofer. It's kind of a double effect there of undermining power generation, also frightening Germans and others who've already been very worried about nuclear power and increasing your leverage on the energy front, but also scaring people from the perspective of the use of nuclear weapon. Those reactors also become a nuclear weapon tactically deployed. And as you said, the discussion of using a nuclear weapon and engendering all those fears. And he's already got an effect. Everyone's running around talking about the Cuban missile crisis and secret diplomacy and how we negotiate away Ukraine in return for Putin not blowing up a nuclear weapon. So he's got a lot of people obviously talking about that.

So sorry for the difficult and dark question. It could be for you directly, or more like, do you think we have a plan for this? What happens if he does drop a nuclear weapon? Do you have a sense that the United States has a good plan?

I know we're talking about it. I think we probably have several plans because it depends on what, where, when, how.

And also, don't these things happen very quickly?

Well, there's also signaling and signs of movement there. I mean, I want to be very kind of careful about this. But the thing is, it's also very important that we do this with other nuclear powers. So the other thing that's different from how it might have been in the past and particularly different from the Cuban missile crisis and the ERA missile crisis, we're not the only nuclear players. China, I mean, has emerging nuclear arsenal now less on the strategic side, but building it up, but very much on the intermediate range. And tactical. Kim Jong Un is firing off weapons left, right and center at the moment in North Korea. We've got other rogue states. Putin's behaving like a rogue state, just to be very clear here. And this is what we've got with Kim Jong Un in North Korea. We've also got India and Pakistan and we've got other states that we're not supposed to talk about, that we now have nuclear capacities and others that would like to have nuclear capacity. And the whole question here is about also proliferation, getting back to that time when Ukraine had nuclear weapons, at least there on its territory in sort of Belarus and Kazakhstan. You've got to wonder, was it wise for them to give it up. We were worried about kind of loose nukes, nuclear weapons kind of getting out of hand, proliferation. At the time we wanted fewer nuclear powers. Russia wanted that, too. Now we're going to have more. We've got more. And what Putin is saying is, well, that was stupid of Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons. In fact, my colleagues and I, back in our report and back in the USSR kind of suggest they shouldn't give him up. And that's why we had the Budapest memorandum. That's why the United States and the United Kingdom in particular have basically some responsibility and obligation going back to 1994 when they promised Ukraine that gave up the nuclear weapons, their territorial integrity and sovereignty would remain intact. Some obligation to actually do something, to step up if we step back from that. This is the thing that people are not talking about. What about nuclear proliferation? If you're South Korea, you're Japan, you're any other country that's kind of worrying about your neighbors and what might happen to you. Just like India and Pakistan are both like, whoa, we've got to kind of keep our strategic nuclear balance here. Everything is up for question. Saudis will want a nuclear weapon. The Turks already want one. They've talked about one for years. Why should the Iranians be the only one with an Islamic nuclear weapon? And if we know that Iran has breakout capacity now, the Saudis and all the other states that are in opposition to Iran will also want to have some nuclear capacity. And the United States before wanted to maintain everything under the nuclear umbrella. One of the reasons why Sweden and Finland are joining NATO is because of suddenly all of these nuclear threats. Sweden was actually the last country on the planet to want to have nuclear weapons. They were actually pushing for a ban on nuclear weapons in the United Nations. Now that Putin's doing the nuclear saber rattling, you know, they're talking about joining and on the verge of joining a nuclear alliance, you know, see what, what's happening here. So we have to make it more and more difficult for Putin to even contemplate that. That's why people are saying this is reckless, this is irresponsible. Putin is actually making the world less safe for himself down the line either. But he's thinking short term here. He's thinking, what can I do? What do I actually have? You can also destroy lots of infrastructure, as he's doing. You can use subversion. We're worried about all of the undersea cables, all these weird things happening off Orkney or in the Mediterranean, or all these other things that are happening. Nord Stream 2 pipelines, other infrastructure. There's all kinds of other things that you can do as well here. It's not just, again, this is civilian nuclear threat of blowing up one of the reactors now. It's got to be sure about where the wind turns and the wind blows. And there's all kinds of things to factor in here. But Putin is definitely sitting around calculating with other people, what can I do to turn this around? He still thinks that he can win this, or in other words, or he can end it on his terms. Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and, you know, capitulation, all recognized as being part of Russia. Or he can freeze it and then, you know, kind of figure out where it goes from there, what other pressure he can put on. I mean, I'm sure he's confident he can get rid of Zelensky and he can prevail over us. I mean, look. I mean, the UK Is going through prime ministers, you know, faster than I'm changing my socks, you know, so it's like, you know, he can prevail on the. You know, basically, he can. He can have an impact on the political scene in Europe and elsewhere. I mean, again, everyone's talking about winter coming, and Putin's thinking, yeah, great, I've destroyed the infrastructure of Ukraine.

I'm worried about the winter.

Well, yeah, but I mean, look, the other thing is that we have to start preparing. I mean, we have to start thinking about this. We've got a wartime economy situation. That's where we are. We've got the home front to think about as well. Putin has declared war on us. He did that on September 30th. He's done it at other points as well. We've just not paid attention. But he was pretty explicit in September 30th. I mean, go back and watch that speech. And he is gambling that people will go back to basically taking Russian gas and oil, but it's not going to be that simple as well. And do people. And then, you know, the question has to be, do we really kind of think he's going to play fair after that when he's kind of also shown that he can leverage that.

It's such a complicated world.

It is complicated. It's very complicated.

It's never. I mean, this. It feels like things are heating up, like. And China is very quiet right now.

Because they're watching what happens. I mean, for President Xi, he's trying to consolidate his power even further after the party congress. But he doesn't want to look like he made a mistake by backing Putin. I mean, he thought Putin was also going to be in, out, and Ukraine would probably be open for massive Chinese investment. China was the largest investor in Ukraine before the War. Largest single investor. I mean, the EU was bigger, of course.

How do you hope the war ends in Ukraine?

Well, I mean, I. I do hope it ends, you know, with a ceasefire, in a negotiated solution, but it has to be with Russia compromising on something, and that's not where we are right now.

Do you think both sides might be willing to compromise?

Most wars always end in that way. I mean, nobody's ever happy, but they.

Don'T seem to either side, like, legitimately doesn't want to compromise right now.

Yeah, because, I mean, look, the thing is that for Ukraine right now, anything is a compromise at its expense. Right. Vast devastation, unbelievable casualty rates. Biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Russia's just said, sorry, this is our territory. It's not just Crimea. I think there could have been a negotiation over that. But, you know, Donetsk and Lukhansk, I mean, we've got all kinds of formulas we've had all the way through history of putting things under a kind of guardianship, receivership of territory, the United nations, all kinds of different ways of formulating that. We could have easily been creative, but Russia's basically saying, no, sorry, we've taken this, and any negotiations, just you recognizing this for us not doing more destruction, that is not the basis for a negotiation. And having people come and just laying those terms down is not a starting position. I think Russia is also in a dilemma of its own making now, because Putin has made it very difficult to compromise just by everything that he said. Now, for Ukraine, they've already won a great moral, political and military victory. It's just hard to see it at the particular moment. They've done what the Finns did in the Winter War, which the Finns were devastated by the Winter War as well, but they pushed them back. Now, the Finns lost a lot of territory, those Corellia and, you know, huge sway of territory, but they got to be Finland, and now they're, you know, joining NATO, but they've been part of the eu. The question is how to, you know, get Ukraine to be Ukraine in a success. Yes, you know, is. And that's the challenge. Now, again, they've already won psychologically, politically, militarily, because Putin hasn't succeeded in what he wanted to do, but he has succeeded in completely and utterly devastating them. And this is the kind of the old Muscovite, old Russian imperial, old servant mentality, you know, going all the way back to when the Muscovites were the bagmen for the, you know, the horde, the. For the Mongols. It was destruction, you know, you don't play with us, we'll destroy you. Yeah, people talk about it as mafia, but it's old. You know, all you have to go down is you go and see Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. I mean, I remember seeing that film when I was first as a student in Moscow and just being, whoa, this is so brutal. I mean, this is just unremittingly brutal. Because the whole point is that you show people who's the boss. The destruction is the point of things as well, because you are emphasizing your domination. And that's what Putin is doing right now is saying, okay, you want to go in a different direction, so be it, but I'm going to make you suffer. Remember when Khodorkovsky got out of the penal colony, When Putin let him out, eventually, he said he suffered enough, but he suffered for 10, 11 years. I don't think Putin feels that Ukraine has suffered enough at this point or we have suffered enough.

So there's a part of this invasion that's punishment for something.

Yeah, it's medieval. I mean, look, we're all capable of the same things, right? There was all that destruction in. That's what Assad was like in Syria, like his father, you destroy because you teach him a lesson. And look, Britain did that in the colonial era. I mean, all the history of British colonialism is exactly the same. I mean, all the MAU MAU, you know, and Kanyo, you know, up until recent times, brutality, teaching people, teaching them a lesson, you have to suffer. The US did it. I mean, we did it with the Native Americans. We did it all over the place as well. This is kind of what big states do at different points in history. Just that Russia has not moved on from that. We've learned some lessons late. I hope we've fully internalized them of things that we've done the past. United States, ideally, are trying to do better, and most of Europe's trying to do better as well. Think about France and Algeria again. You know, we can see this in many different settings, but I think, you know, for Putin right now, he hasn't taught all of us sufficient a lesson.

I just. I talked to hundreds of people in Ukraine, and the tough thing, the inspiring thing, is that there's a unity. The tough thing is a lot of them speak intensely of hate towards not just Russia, but Russians. Russians.

That's how Europeans felt about Germany and Germans at the end of World War II.

And generational hate, like, well, I don't think that hate is gonna pass.

While it might, it might well take A generation. I mean, I won. When I was a kid in the 70s, I went on exchanges to Germany, and that was like, you know, 30 years, more than 30 years after the end of the war. My grandfather had fought in World War I. Wouldn't speak to my parents when they sent me on a. I mean, he hadn't fought in World War II. We fought World War I. He hated the Germans, and he did not want me going, you know, to Germany as an exchange student. He refused to meet, you know, kind of the German kid who, you know, came to stay at my house, you know, for example. I mean, it takes a long time to. It takes a long time to get over that. But. But you do. I mean, and we have. We have in Europe. And that was the whole point of, you know, all of that kind of exercise of European unity after World War II. Now the big challenge is, what do we do with Russia? Because a lot of people are talking now, we can't have European security without Russia. Other people are saying, we can't have a Europe, you know, kind of with Russia, you know, so how do we deal with this? We've got to basically kind of. It's going to be like Japan and Germany after World War II, after this. Just the level of the atrocities that have been carried out, as you said, the level of hatred. But we found a way of doing it. Now, a lot of it will require change on the part of Russia as well, and Russians. And really thinking about this, I mean, Gorbachev before tried to deal in the late 1980s with the black spots, with glasnost, with openness, and talking about Russian history just kind of never sort of withered on the vine as time went on.

What gives you hope about the future?

Well, my hope comes into the fact that we've done things before, that we've got ourselves out of tough times and we've overcome stuff and in people, because I meet amazing people. You just talked about hundreds of people that you've met with in Ukraine. And, you know, people all think differently. Contexts and circumstances change, and people can evolve. Some people get stuck. Putin's got stuck. But people can evolve. And, you know, I do think that if we all pull together and we've seen this in so many contexts, we can find solutions to things. Just like we get back again to our discussion about scientists and just the kind of amazing breakthroughs of, you know, what we did on Covid or done on, you know, kind of other diseases and things. And look, there is some similarities. There's a pathology around war and conflict. Years ago in the 1990s, I worked on, you know, a lot of projects that were funded by the Carnegie Corporation of the United States under the then presidency of David Hamburg, who was a scientist and actually did see a lot of parallels between the sort of, like, the pathology of disease and, you know, kind of the pestilence, you know, conflict kind of idea. And of course, these, you know, parallels had to be very careful because, you know, they're not neat. But there was kind of like an idea in there and how do you sort of treat this? How do you deal with this? And we did come up with all kinds of ideas and things that are still out there. We've created institutions that have helped to keep the peace. We just have neglected them, allowed them to degrade, just like the United Nations. And we've created problems inside of them, like the veto power of the permanent powers on the UN Security Council. But we can change that. You've just got to have a will. And I do think out there, there are sufficient people with a will, and we've just got to get people mobilized. I mean, I'm always amazed by how people can mobilize themselves around a crisis. Remember Winston Churchill? I don't quote all the time because I can never remember half his quotes, but I do remember the one about never let a good crisis go to waste. And I always think that, that, you know, yeah, we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste. And something else can come out of this. Just like in Ukraine, we worried before about corruption in Ukraine. The influence, the oligarchs. We've got our own oligarchs here in the US we need to, you know, deal with as well. But this is a chance to do it differently. Yeah, it really is a chance to do things differently.

And a part of that is young people. I have to ask you.

It is young people. I mean, I'm feeling a bit on the older side now, but I still feel I've got, you know, a bit of, you know, kind of youth within me. Yet at 57, I'm not that old, but I'm not that young. But we have to work together with younger and older people. You might work together in coalitions of, you know, across generations.

You remind me of, of kids who just graduated college and saying, I, I'm. I feel old. It's like, yeah, no, I don't actually.

Feel old, but it is a number edge. And, you know, when, you know, you kind of think about when I was.

I thought, you don't like math.

Yeah, things like that. Yeah, But I find it interesting. But, you know, when I was. I remember when I was a little kid, I kept thinking about the year 2000, and I thought, oh, my God, I'll be dead. I'll be 35. Yeah, 22 years ago.

You've overcome a lot of struggle in your life based on different reasons as you write about class being one of them, your funny sounding accent being another, or just representation of class. But in general, through all of that, to be at the White House, to be one of the most powerful voices in the world, what advice would you give from grounded in your life story to somebody who's young, somebody who's in high school and college, thinking of how they can have a big positive impact on the world?

Look, we all have a voice, right? We all have agency. We all actually have the ability to do something. And you can start small in your local community or even in your own classroom, just helping somebody else out or something, speaking up and advocating on behalf of things. You know, when I was a. I was like, about 11 years old, I got involved with other kids on Save the Whales. You know, we had all this, you know, kind of. We were hardly Greta Thunberg, but we, you know, we kind of got together in a kind of network, writing to people and, you know, trying to raise money to, you know, help save the whales. Now, actually, the whales of the world are doing somewhat better. I can't say that that was because of me and my network, but, you know, it was kind of a way of organizing and, you know, kind of joining in a larger movement. Everybody can be part of something bigger. The thing is, it's all about working together with others and giving other people a chance as well. I think, you know, one thing is that our voices have more impact when they're amplified. They don't have to be the voices of discord or the voices of hate. You know, you've been, you know, trying to do this with your podcast. You know, kind of give people a broader voice, give them a kind of platform and get them to join in with other people. And one of the things that I've been trying to do is kind of go and talk to just as many people as I possibly can and say, look, we can all do something here. We can all lend our voices to a cause that we care deeply about. We can be kind to each other. We can give other people a chance. We can kind of speak out while we see that something is wrong, and we can try to explain things to people. And what I'm Trying to do at the moment is just acceptable. Explain, you know, what I've learned about things and, you know, hope that that helps people make informed judgments of their own and that, you know, kind of maybe take things further and learn something more. It's like kind of like building up on, you know, the knowledge, you know, that. That I have, you know, to try to impart to others. And everybody can do that different ways. You can kind of write, reach back if you're 14, help somebody who's 7 for 21. Help somebody who's 14. You know, kind of if in, you know, the kind of my age now, I'm always trying to, you know, reach back and, you know, work with younger people, listen to younger people, help them out, make connections for them, listen to what they have to say about something, try to incorporate that and, you know, things that I'm saying as well. The main point is that we've all got a voice, we've all got agency. And it always works better when we work together with other people.

But sometimes it can feel pretty hopeless. It can feel. I mean, there's low points. You seem to have a kind of restless energy, a drive to you. Were there low points in the beginning when in your early days when you're trying to get the education, where it may have not been clear to you that you could be at all successful?

Yeah, there always were. I mean, there were lots of points where I was just despondent. But then, you know, I'd meet somebody who would just suddenly turn things around. I was this luck, or was I out there looking for it? You know, sometimes, you know, you just. If you're open and receptive to, you know, kind of hearing something from someone else. I mean, I. You know, there are often times where I felt so despondent, you know, in such a black mood, I didn't think I'd be able to go on. And then I'd have a chance conversation with somebody. I mean, I once remember, you know, I was sitting on a bench, I was probably 11 or 12, just crying my eyes out, just really upset. And an old lady just came and sat next to me, put her arm around me, said, oh, it's not right, pet. What's the matter? You know, it can't be that bad, can it? And it was just this human embrace. It's like somebody, you know, just basically reaching out to me that snapped me out of it. And I thought, you know, here's somebody just, you know, she didn't know who I was. She just felt really bad. That I was, you know, sitting, you know, crying and I mean, I can't even remember what it was about anymore. You know, now it just seems inconsequential. At the time, I probably thought my life was at an end. Just, you know, sometimes people making eye contact with you in the street and saying something to you can kind of pull you out of something. And, you know, it's kind of a. I think you would just have to open yourself up to the prospect that not everyone's bad. Just like you were saying before, that there's, you know, good in everybody. Even during, you know, that really difficult period of impeachment. You know, I was trying to listen very carefully to people and I thought, we always. We still have something in common here. We need to remember that. You know, kind of when people are kind of forgetting who they are or, you know, the context in their operating, there's always something that can, you know, can pull you back again. There's always that kind of thread.

So I'm sure you were probably attacked by a lot of people and you were still able to keep that optimism that.

Well, I kept it into kind of perspective like when I was a kid. I mean, things are going to mention before I got bullied, you know, kind of again, and I try to understand why they're doing this. One of the most amazing things that happened, you know, really on was my. My dad was a pretty incredible person and he would always open my eyes to something. And I was getting bullied really nastily by a girl at school, and my dad started asking me questions about her. And one day my dad said we were going to go for a walk. And my town's very small, remember, it's very depressed, really, you know, deprived area. And we go to this housing estate, public housing place that's not too far away from where I live. And it's really, you know, kind of one of the most rundown places in an already rundown place. My dad, like, knocks on the door and I said, what are we doing, dad? And I see, he says, we're going off to, you know, we're going to visit somebody, an old family friend. I think they were even, you know, a distant relative. Knock on the door and this old man answers the door and he's, oh, Alfie. My dad's name was Alfalfie, you know, kind of, oh, fancy seeing you. We haven't seen you. Come on in, have a cup of tea. What are you doing? He said, oh, I'm just walking past my daughter. We're going for A trip. We're going for a walk. And then suddenly I see that girl and she's in the kitchen, and I'm thinking, oh, my God. Bloody hell. You know, British expression. What's this? And it turns out that dad had figured out who she was and he knew her grandfather, and she was living with her grandfather, and she'd been abandoned by her parents, and she was living in, you know, pretty dire circumstances, and she'd been getting raised by her grandfather, and she. She was just miserable. And the reason she was bullying me was to make herself feel better.

Yeah.

And after that, she never bullied me again. I mean, we didn't even talk because there was a connection made. And suddenly she realized that her grandfather, who was the only person she had, knew my dad. And there was some. They were friends or they were even family, some, you know, kind of relationship there. I mean, I. I was related to half of north of England. I had no idea how we were related. You know, everybody was some relative because people have lived there for generations together in this very small area. And that turned things around. So just remember you might have. And that's kind of suddenly taught to me. There's always a reason why somebody's doing something. A lot of the times they're really unhappy with themselves. Sometimes there's something else going on in their lives. Sometimes they just don't know any better. And I shouldn't take it personally because I don't have a personal connection with half these people who are out there saying that they want this and that to happen to me.

Well, thank you for the kindness and the empathy you still carry in your heart. I can see it through all that you must have gone through in the recent couple of years. It's really inspiring to see that and thank you for everything you've done, for the work you've written and for the work you continue to write and to do. This seems like a really, really difficult time for human civilization on a topic that you're a world expert in. So don't mess it up.

No, I know, but that's what I was saying. Do everybody have that? Let's just keep it together, right? Yeah, exactly. Let's just keep it together.

Your words have a lot of power right now, so it's. It's a really, really tricky time. So thank you so much, given how valuable your time is to sit down with me today. It was an honor.

No, thanks. No, it's a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you as well. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Fiona Hill to support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from John Steinbeck. Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts. Perhaps the fear of the loss of power. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.