What Does Trump See in Putin?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Fiona, thank you for joining me. It’s really hard to think of anyone we’d rather have on at this particular moment in history, which has brought back so much of what you’ve written in Foreign Affairs over the last few years about Putin, about Ukraine, and about Trump, and about how the interaction among them is reshaping geopolitics right now.

FIONA HILL

Thanks so much, Dan. I’m really glad to be here with you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In part because there are so many ways into this conversation, I’ll start very broad. As you’ve watched the first seven or so weeks of Trump’s second term, what has surprised you?

FIONA HILL

Speed. You just had seven weeks, and I thought, “Gosh, has it only been seven weeks?” Yes, it’s definitely the speed of things. There were a lot of things that I did anticipate, but honestly, I will confess I didn’t expect it to happen this fast—and this furious as well.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you watched that rather extraordinary encounter in the Oval Office between President Trump and President Zelensky, did that surprise you? What stood out to you about that? When you were the top National Security Council official handling Russia and Europe during Trump’s first term, you were present for early interactions between Trump and Zelensky, including those that led to the Trump impeachment in 2019. So as you watched this, what did you think was going on on Trump’s side? And how did you think Zelensky handled it?

FIONA HILL

Well, on Trump’s part, it was sort of vintage Trump and very reflective of his feelings of antipathy towards Zelensky personally and towards Ukraine. I think what was very telling was that he doesn’t want to be associated with Ukraine in any way, basically telling them they had no cards, that it was the United States that had puffed up Ukraine and Zelensky himself to be a tough guy, that they were losers, basically had the losing hand. And he was basically telling them they should sort of give it up already, and also making it very clear that any undertaking or any agreement that had already been made with Zelensky and Ukraine by the United States by previous presidents was null and void, because I think the thing to bear in mind when you’re watching all of this was Zelensky was already walking into an interaction that wasn’t going to go favorably for him.

And I think in terms of Zelensky and his whole team, they didn’t do sufficient preparation for this. And in part, it’s not entirely their fault because I don’t think they fully understood what they were dealing with. Trump was basically telling Zelensky that he had to make a personal agreement, in effect, a treaty of friendship with him. That was the rare earths, the raw materials agreement. I don’t think Zelensky fully understood that this was not just a continuation of agreements with the United States and with previous presidents, but that this was something to cement the deal with Trump himself personally, and that this was all very personal.

And you can see that, where Zelensky really went awry—there were two different things that went wrong. First of all, he shouldn’t have been speaking in English. And what he should’ve done was slow the whole thing down and used his Ukrainian interpreter; and I think in the future they need to have a really good interpreter. Perhaps they even need to assign a special envoy, in the way that Trump has done this, to basically engage—somebody who is capable of holding their own in these kinds of environments. Because I don’t think Zelensky, on the one hand, really understood where Trump was coming from, and on the other hand, didn’t really understand the way that everything was being phrased. It was moving very fast. And even for a native English speaker, it would’ve been hard to keep on the game. His English is good, but it’s not native, and that’s 101 in diplomacy. You don’t have an interaction, no matter how good you are, in your non-native language. So that’s, again, a problem.

There was also a lot of the people around Trump and the team around Kellogg, and obviously we heard that also from Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, they were very angry with Zelensky because they said that they’d told him already what he was expected to do, which was go in, thank the president profusely, sign the deal, and get out and do something that was going to be good for television, not in the terrible way in which it played out, but in the way of performatively thanking the president. And he didn’t do that, because, again, I don’t think he fully understood, because, again, they were explaining to him in their terms. They understand how Trump operates, and Zelensky absolutely doesn’t.

And where it really went wrong was when Zelensky was trying to remind Trump of two things: first off, in the way that Vladimir Putin operates, which Trump didn’t really want to hear; and secondly, that there were commitments already made to Ukraine and to Zelensky by previous presidents. And that’s when Trump essentially lost it. He basically said, “Those people don’t count for anything. No one respected them. They were weak. They were useless. People respect me. This is with me.” So this is a hyper-personalized set of interactions. And it’s not really about the team. It’s not really about the people around Trump. It’s just the way that Zelensky was supposed to behave with Trump himself. And it was ahead of the State of the Union. There were all these compilation videos that had been made on behalf of Trump by his press office of people thanking President Trump, from hostages that had been released, to other people thanking him for all the things that he’s done that he could refer to. And I think Zelensky was supposed to be fitting into the same frame, and he did not get that message. He genuinely thought he was still negotiating for some kind of security guarantees. He didn’t realize he was making a personal treaty, perhaps not even really of friendship, but of some kind of undertaking with President Trump himself personally.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So when you were at the National Security Council, you were not only in the room with Trump and Zelensky; you were also in meetings with Trump and Putin, and you were, of course, doing that after many years of studying Putin and Russia carefully, both as a scholar and as a member of the U.S. intelligence community. You wrote an extraordinary essay in our November/December 2021 issue called “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory” that’s especially extraordinary because it came months before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and years before Trump’s reelection, and yet seemed to portend so much of what we’ve seen in the years since in both regards. And that essay opens with a really vivid and kind of staggering description of the July 2018 meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, when you watched in dismay as Trump, in public, echoed Putin’s talking points over those of his own intelligence officials.

You understand the dynamic between these two figures almost as well as anyone. How do you explain it? What’s it like in the room? Who drives conversation? What’s the atmosphere like? And what does that tell you about what may happen in that particular relationship in the months ahead? Trump has said that he wants to meet with Putin at some point, and we’ll see whether that happens, but we’re certainly looking towards another such summit, which will be similarly dramatic, I assume.

FIONA HILL

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of the same things I’ve just said about the interaction with Zelensky that would hold true for this one, but pops on the other side of the ledger. Trump isn’t really all that prepared for his meetings with Putin, and interpretation, in his view, is kind of meaningless. And having people who actually really understand the situation, who Putin is, and what Russia is about, is key as well, because although it’s a hyper-personalized setup in Russia as well, Putin’s the main guy. He is where all decision-making begins and ends with. He also does have a system around him. He is a product of the deep state. He actually likes the state in Russia. He uses it, and he’s got a whole number of state functionaries, like Ushakov, his presidential advisor; [Sergei] Lavrov, the foreign minister; Kirill Dmitriev, who many must have seen active in these negotiations with the United States, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, who for many people is certainly not a household name and not somebody that people were expecting to see.

And all of these people have been in the Russian system for years. Kirill Dmitriev’s wife is close to Putin’s daughter. Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the sovereign wealth fund, is Harvard-trained, went to business school. He’s worked at Goldman Sachs. His English is impeccable. Same with [Yuri] Ushakov and Lavrov. Lavrov, of course, has been foreign minister since time immemorial, it seems, certainly longer than seven weeks. And also the Russian representative of the UN. These guys know what they’re doing. And, again, they speak impeccable English, and they know all their talking points. They know what country they work for. They know how their system operates. They know all the externalities as well. They’ve got a complete picture of the fields of play. And I think what we’re sort of seeing with President Trump, which I saw the first time around, is he’s fixated on the one guy himself, on Putin. He sees other people, the intermediaries around him, basically as just conduits to Putin or some ways of just facilitating interactions. Certainly interpreters, certainly his own staff, he doesn’t pay any attention to. It’s all about being able to sit down with Putin.

And when you’re not prepared and when you don’t know where the other person is coming from—it’s just about his interaction—then of course you’re going to be taking on the talking points of Russia, because the only peer he sees in this relationship—it’s certainly not [Steven] Witkoff, it’s not [Marco] Rubio for certain, absolutely not. He’s a secretary. He’s a secretary of state, but for Trump, he’s absolutely a secretary. He’s just a member of staff. [Michael] Waltz, it’s the same thing. Witkoff might be a billionaire or millionaire and kind of an ambassador and have had a business role before, but, again, he’s just brokering a deal. That’s how Trump saw Rex Tillerson before, or H.R. McMaster, or John Bolton, or any of the various people who were working from previously. They were nothing in their own right. They were just facilitators and conduits. And it’s the same with a translator. He’s not listening, really, to the words. He’s just trying to get the vibe.

The very first time I was in one of the phone calls with Putin, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don’t always capture everything. They don’t capture the nuances. And particularly when it’s the Russian interpreter, who’s translating into a language that’s also not their native language, all kinds of things are missing. And Trump said, “What a great conversation.” I thought, actually, not really. There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said. He chooses words very carefully.

Many times when Putin and Trump are interacting, Putin’s actually making fun of him. It’s just completely lost in the translation. I can give lots of episodes of this. Or he’s goading him and urging him onto something because he’s trying to see how he will react. And the translation smooths over all of that. That context is absolutely missing. And he doesn’t do a readout afterwards. And we heard, for example, that Witkoff spent several hours one-on-one with Putin. Was anyone translating? Was Witkoff making notes in real time? Or was he trying to remember what was said afterwards? All of this is amateur hour because it means that you’re not really fully cognizant of what it is that the Russians have said beyond what you’ve taken on board from their talking points.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And it’s worth noting that Witkoff is Steve Witkoff, who is ostensibly the Middle East envoy, certainly not a Russia specialist, a longtime New York real estate mogul, who is suddenly in this position. So it’s not exactly a worthy successor to Fiona Hill who’s doing this.

Publicly, Russian leaders have reacted to Trump’s early moves in the second term with a degree of triumphalism, I would say. And you can see that in the statements of lots of officials and in what Putin himself has said. But you noted in that 2021 piece and in others that Putin has, in the past, not seen Trump’s volatility and obsequiousness as entirely a good thing. You recalled that leaving that Helsinki press conference, that notorious encounter, Putin said to his press secretary that the whole thing was, and quoting you here, “bullshit.” As you see Putin’s reaction and Moscow’s reaction this time around, how do you think they’re reacting to Trump’s early moves? Have they figured out how to manage the volatility? What does the picture look like to Putin? And what do you think his strategy towards Trump is at this point?

FIONA HILL

Well, I think it’s a real mixed picture. I mean, as you said, there’s been quite a bit of euphoria in Russia. In fact, they think that they’ve walked into a fairytale, where there’s all these Russian fairytales where somebody finds a golden fish or a firebird, or it’s like the genie-in-the lamp kind of equivalent, and all their wishes come true. And in many respects, that’s what’s happened.

Putin wanted Ukraine to capitulate; It looks like that’s what Trump is trying to facilitate for him. Putin wanted to see a rift between the United States and NATO, and the United States and all its European allies; and Trump’s doing that in spades, and also with Canada and Mexico and pretty much everybody else as well. The Russians would’ve loved the United States in every other interaction to just take on their talking points without any kind of pushback, and that’s exactly what’s happened as well.

And the thing is, what we’ve done here is we’ve just gone completely over to the Russian side of the position, which is not necessarily good for Russia either. And I think that that’s also creating some apprehension in Moscow. What does this mean? Does this actually mean that the United States has completely shifted its position? I mean, Trump certainly has been of many of these views all the way along because he’s a strongman. He sees Putin as a peer, as a fellow strongman. He wants to rule the United States in the way that he thinks that Russia is ruled by Putin. But Putin also himself is beholden to public opinion. There’s also a whole series of war bloggers and nationalists and others who are also trying to hold Putin’s feet to the fire. And there’s also a lot of anxiety about whether the United States and Trump can be trusted to stick to their word, because the first time around, Putin also was hopeful, and all the Russians were very hopeful. They were popping champagne corks when Trump got elected because they certainly didn’t want to see Hillary Clinton elected in 2016. But they didn’t get what they wanted out of it.

Trump himself keeps saying, “I was tougher on Russia than anyone else.” Well, that was also not true, but, in fact, it was the team of people around him who, once Russia started doing various things, basically persuaded Trump that he needed to push back, or he would look weak. But Trump has never believed that Russia has been interfering in the political space. And so he wants to now take Putin at face value, irrespective of all the things that Russia has actually done. And in a way, now the Russians are kind of feeling that maybe they’re the dog that caught the car, and so they’re not really sure where this is going to go. And, in fact, I’ve got colleagues who’ve been taking part in some of these Track IIs that have been happening in Geneva and elsewhere. And one was taken aside by one of the Russians saying that they’re worried that this would lead to a crisis, because Trump will also expect now that Putin will bring peace, that peace will break out all over, and that Putin actually is perhaps not in a position to do that.

So let’s just play the scenario. Ukraine completely capitulates. Trump has been saying, “Maybe there’ll be a country; maybe there won’t be a country.” So Russia gets control of the territory that it holds. Maybe it gets control of the territory it claims, because it doesn’t hold all of the territory that it claims to have annexed. Then what? You really think that the Ukrainians are going to put down all their arms? Is Trump going to force them to do so? Is there not going to be rearguard action? Ukraine as a failed state on the borders of Russia, as well as on the borders of Europe, isn’t necessarily going to be something that Russia wants. And once the facade of a U.S.-Russian confrontation is stripped away, this becomes what it always has been, which is a Russian assault on Europe, the second largest land war in Europe after World War II, the first one being Chechnya, where Russia invaded its own territory and created absolute chaos.

And effectively what you’ll now see is that Europe is in a war with Russia over Ukraine because this is existential to European security—and it may not be what Hungary thinks or Slovakia thinks, but certainly what a heck of a lot of other European countries think. And that means that China, North Korea, and Iran are also engaging in a war against Europe. They joined it because they thought that they could take potshots at the United States. But this becomes extraordinarily complicated because Russia might be able to, and Putin may be able to have their discussions with Trump, but it doesn’t resolve the question of European security, because Trump’s saying, “I want nothing to do with European security. They’re on their own.” So actually, this becomes really complicated, and so does the question of proliferation as well. Lots of people are talking about this now.

Basically what Putin has done is make it much more likely that European countries and other neighbors like Japan, South Korea, for example, will be rushing to get a nuclear weapon. Because the United States, along with Russia and the United Kingdom, gave Ukraine assurances, guarantees as far as the Ukrainians were concerned, that when they gave up nuclear weapons that they’d inherited from the Soviet Union back in the 1990s, when they and Belarus and Kazakhstan gave those weapons back to Moscow to be dismantled, that they would be guaranteed that nothing bad would ever happen to them—certainly that they wouldn’t be invaded by Russia, and that’s exactly what’s happened. So the lesson to everyone else is, you’re going to get clobbered by a nuclear power. And Trump wants to have nuclear negotiations with Putin. Well, he might be able to do that, but he might have also presided over the proliferation of nuclear weapons to many more countries than have them already.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs with Angela Stent one year into the war in Ukraine noting that, and I’m quoting you here, “Despite a series of blunders, miscalculations and battlefield reversals that would’ve surely seen him thrown out of office in most normal countries, Putin is still at the pinnacle of power in Russia.” Two years later, more than two years later, Putin has continued to struggle in this war. The Russian economy has done better than I think most people would’ve imagined, given how much it’s been sanctioned and how much pressure has been put on it by the United States and its allies, but it’s still going okay, but not great for most Russians. Putin has had to resort to various fairly extreme measures to get adequate men to the frontline, including, again, several thousand North Korean troops. Is it still your assessment that Putin’s power is fairly secure? And if so, what accounts for that? Why has that not been dented more by his rather flailing effort in Ukraine?

FIONA HILL

Well, because there’s multiple battlefields. I mean, it is actually true, contrary to what President Trump and others think, that Russia hasn’t done as well as one would expect on the battlefield, because it still hasn’t taken over the whole of Ukraine, which was definitely the goal when Putin first moved in with his special military operation. Now, on that particular battlefield, Trump is actually Putin’s best hope, because Trump, again, as he said in the Oval Office to Zelensky, “We’re the ones who’ve made you a tough guy. If we take away our support, you’re finished. So you need to get to the table.” Well, in actual fact, Ukraine’s still got some fight in it. We saw these drone attacks on Moscow, and we’ve seen Europeans rallying around. Now, admittedly, they can’t compensate for the United States anytime soon and everybody knows that, but it doesn’t mean that Ukraine’s fighting spirit is completely gone.

And, again, there’s been lots of calculations made by very smart military analysts that it would take something like 118 years for Russia to take over Ukraine at the pace that it’s going. And if Ukraine really wanted to dig in and reinforce the lines of contact, it actually could with some assistance. And perhaps that’s something that they should’ve done before, but Ukraine never wanted to give up the idea that it might be able to incrementally take back some of its territory, but I think Ukrainians are seeing the reality of the situation right now.

But the other thing that Putin was really relying on was the broader psychological battlefield, the broader political battlefield as well. And psychologically, he’s given everybody the impression that he’s won. He’s certainly given Trump the impression that he’s won, and many other people besides that as well. And politically, he was hoping for a change in government in many different countries, just like Vice President Vance seemed to be hoping for. He was hoping that the AfD would win in Germany. Well, they haven’t. I mean, the CDU has, but again, in a difficult situation where there’ll have to be a coalition government, but Friedrich Merz, the head of the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, has started to be pretty forceful in the things that he has said about Russia and also about the United States and its stance.

In the United Kingdom in July, it was the Labour Party that won, and the Labour Party have actually been quite forward-leaning in terms of their continued support for Ukraine, based on the previous conservative governments and Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and all the other intervening prime ministers. There’s been, actually, a continuation of support for Ukraine. Similarly in France, at the top level, [Emmanuel] Macron, but very importantly in countries like Poland, the Baltic states, all the Nordic countries and Sweden and Finland are now part of NATO, and Sweden and Finland actually have real resources. They’re bordering countries with Russia. So some of the things that Putin was holding out for haven’t exactly happened. But Putin still thinks that he can manipulate the situation.

And this is where, getting back to what we were talking about before about where Trump may be a mixed bag, he may not like it that Trump has become basically antagonistic towards Europe as well, because in Putin’s view, just as in Trump’s view, Europe is a set of vassal states. The European Union, Trump said, was basically created to rip off the United States. He wants to see the end of the European Union. Putin sees the European Union as formidable in its ability to aggregate economic potential and financial wherewithal, which is actually we’re seeing right now with the EU talking about putting up billions in defense spending and also talking about doing that in a NATO context so that countries like Norway, the U.K., Switzerland, and also Turkey could be involved in defense spending. And it seems like this has been done precisely in reaction to the United States, not just in reaction to Putin, which suggests that Europe has agency and other countries have agency as well. And so Putin may have to do other things to maintain his position. And then the question is what’s going on inside of the domestic battlefield? Now, obviously he’s eliminated all opposition, but there are these nationalist bloggers. There are people who want to see the war pursued to its final solution in their view, which is the subjugation of Ukraine and then from there, the subjugation of other countries to make sure they don’t go their own way.

They will also be keeping Putin in their cross-hairs, which of course we already saw with Prigozhin. We’ve already forgotten that, that there was an insurgency, there was an attempt to change the tide in Russia. And if it becomes more clear about the huge cost that Putin has incurred, and that maybe that isn’t acceptable to others, things may change as well. For him, it’s a price, which is different from a cost. A cost may be something seen as negative, but for him, it’s a price worth paying if he has success. And success is not 100 percent guaranteed at this particular juncture.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What kind of deal would Putin be interested in when it comes to ending the war in Ukraine? You’ve written in the past, and many commentators assume, that a cease-fire would be really just a chance for him to re-arm and to rest his troops for another offensive, but is there some deal that you can imagine that would really result in a sustainable end to this war, even if more of an armistice than a true peace deal?

FIONA HILL

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? And that’s what Zelensky was trying to get at in the Oval Office to no avail, pointing out that armistice-equivalent cease-fires, just like we’re seeing in Gaza, with difficulties of how hard it is once you get beyond just getting the fighting stopped, the big issues have to be resolved. Things are much more difficult. The devil’s always in those very big details. So getting an armistice, and the Ukrainians are proposing right now, that are at air and at sea. And you also got to remember that the Ukrainians have wiped out a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet without having a fleet of their own. They’ve done that also with drones and basically autonomous vehicles for weapons. So the Ukrainians have been quite effective in that regard, and we have the World War I–type frontline, which is actually very difficult. And it’s not just a war of attrition. It’s dynamic. It’s back and forth. But I think it’s actually quite difficult for Putin to affect a cease-fire and then take it from there, because, I mean, he obviously wants, then, things that are not in Trump’s wherewithal to hand over. And I don’t know whether Trump can actually force the Ukrainians to give up territory that they hold, rather than that Russia holds.

And then Putin has also made it very clear Russia’s terms are pretty extensive, which is also no army of any conceivable size that could defend itself on the part of Ukraine, not joining NATO. And actually NATO may be the least of things at the moment, because there are other military bilateral treaties that Ukraine can avail itself of with a whole host of other countries and other arrangements that it doesn’t actually need NATO, to be frank, at this particular point, to defend itself. And also the United States is pulling back from that, so it diminishes that value of the military relationship with the United States. It used to be enshrined within NATO, plus the nuclear umbrella, but Russia obviously has said, “Uh-uh, we don’t want to be talking about new European security arrangements.” They don’t want any European troops in Ukraine, which is European territory, and this is all about European security. They would like to have the United States pull back, but they can’t force Poland to pull out Polish troops in Polish soil, or Finns to pull out Finnish troops in Finnish soil, or Baltic states to pull out their own troops, or Canadians, Germans, and the UK forces, who are prepositioned forward, deployed in the Baltic states, from pulling out.

So there’s all kinds of things going on here. And the Russians are saying they want the root causes of this conflict resolved, which for them is: they want a sphere of influence recognized. And the United States might say, “Yeah, great, okay, we recognize your ability to have a sphere of influence in Europe. But what about Europe?” They have agency. You can’t just infantilize the Europeans, just basically say, “We’re not with you anymore. You’re on your own,” and then expect them to just sit about. There is an assumption in the United States a lot of the time, I have to say, that the Europeans aren’t capable of anything. Well, what are they talking about? They’re talking about, what, France and Germany, maybe? JD Vance’s random countries that haven’t fought a war? Well, JD Vance has probably not been to Finland and has not seen the frontlines there, probably not been to Norway or Sweden. Perhaps he has, but I don’t think he’s fully processed it. Has he been to Poland and seen how the Poles are trying to build themselves up? The Turks have certainly fought wars, and they’re part of NATO. The Turks have been in Syria recently and also involved in Iraq.

And frankly, again, as Europeans keep pointing out, the only time that Article 5 was invoked was on behalf of the United States after 9/11. And European troops, including Georgians and many others who were not part of NATO, went to support the United States in Afghanistan and also in Iraq. So there’s a lot going on here. And although the Russians have been very clear on what they want, I do not believe that Trump has the ability to give them everything that they want and to force other people to give up things, because everything is going to be a concession for Ukraine, and everything’s also going to be a concession for Europe. And again, a cease-fire is one thing, but resolving all of the issues on this is something else. And it may be that lots of Americans may believe that Russia has a right to a sphere of influence, but a heck of a lot of Europeans certainly don’t believe that, particularly when it comes to them being in the sphere of influence.

And also what Trump has done in terms of threatening Canada and Greenland, which people should take very seriously, because I’m pretty convinced he means it, and then also the pressure on Panama, is basically showing countries a very different view of the United States. There’s a genuine rupture in the relationship between the United States and its allies at this point, not just European allies, but, say, Japan, South Korea, and others. And it’s a one-sided rupture. It’s basically come from the United States saying it’s not going to be an ally anymore. It’s going to be “America first” and really not interested in what happens in the security of other countries.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you assess the European reactions so far as you watched what various leaders in governments in Europe have done over the last couple of months? Do you think they’re doing what they need to do? Are there things they should be doing that they’re not so far?

FIONA HILL

Well, I think the problem has been the speed of it. People have just been in this state of shock. So they should’ve been forewarned a long time ago. Going back to, frankly, [John F.] Kennedy and [Lyndon] Johnson and back to the 1960s and 1970s, Europeans were being told they needed to do more for their own defense; they shouldn’t be relying exclusively on the United States. Bob Gates, Secretary Gates, who went, obviously, from the Bush to the Obama administration, made that point over and over again. They knew this, and this is on them, that they didn’t take steps. They allowed their militaries to get hollowed out. They were focused on expeditionary forces, indeed helping the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq and, in the French case, in the Sahel and Mali and places like this. They weren’t thinking that they might have to engage in a peer war, a major-power, state-on-state conflict. Well, now they are, and this really means that the European part of NATO needs to step up. And they’ve realized that, and I would say, belatedly. Let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

I think there’s some really serious discussions going on, again, about pooling resources from the EU, but also other NATO countries looking at capabilities and capacities. The Finns certainly have a lot of military capacity. Countries are building up their armed forces again. They’re talking about building up their military industrial base. They realize that they’re in a very difficult environment. Obviously, in the aggregate, they’ve got a lot of potential. Countries will see the threat differently from Russia. Obviously, the threat of a land war is very real for Poland and for the Baltic states and for Finland and anyone who has a direct border, is in very close proximity to Russia, and that will require more investment in land armies and perhaps in tanks, although, as I said, we talked about drones and the whole face of warfare changing, but at the same time, we’ve seen in Ukraine that’s not always the case. But critical national infrastructure for every country is under risk, not just from bombardment by drones. I mean, Ukraine has been devastated by these attacks. But also GPS jamming—that’s what the Russians have done. Remember there was that dreadful case of a Azerbaijani flight that not just got its GPS jammed, but was also hit by anti-aircraft fire over Russia.

So there’s all these kinds of things that are happening in the vicinity of Russia, commercial airlines and then military aircraft. You’ve got Russian surveillance ships all over in the maritime zone looking at critical cables, undersea cables. And the United States is connected to the rest of Europe through these cables in the Atlantic. The UK, for example, is a hub for all the communication networks, including for the United States. The United States would be just as affected by an attack on undersea cables. And then you’ve got pipelines, critical gas pipelines, and basically cyber attacks. I was shocked to see that the United States was—I mean, I suppose they’re signaling to Russia, but—getting rid of offensive cyber or cyber monitoring against Russia, when Russia, as everybody knows—I mean, the Europeans are not idiots on this front. They know that Russia, along with China and Iran, is a major perpetrator, particularly for criminal groups as well, of cyber attacks, ransomware attacks, for example.

So these are real, and every single day there are assaults on European publics through disinformation and propaganda coming from the United States now as well, not just from Russia. So there’s a feeling in Europe that they’re caught between a rock and a hard place, the rock being Russia, which the threat hasn’t really changed, and then the technological challenge from China, rather than perhaps a direct military challenge, obviously. But with China, Iran, and North Korea helping Russia, the whole security’s has become global, global dimensions here. And then the hard place is the United States because nobody knows how to act with it. Is it going to be an adversary? The United States is making challenges against free speech in Europe. Under the guise of protecting free speech, they’re basically demanding that people apologize for saying things about President Trump, or they’re basically saying that governments should be overthrown, et cetera, et cetera, but nobody should say anything back to the United States. I mean, this is basically a chaotic mess. So the Europeans are also, while they’re trying to navigate the more conventional, so to speak, threat from Russia, are also trying to navigate what was a very unconventional threat now from the United States to disrupt their ability to basically improve their military position.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the grim scenario where a bad deal is forced on Ukraine and Putin is allowed to get most of what he wants and escape sanctions and otherwise kind of get away with it, do you imagine that he will go further and start to test NATO by going into the Baltics or into Poland? Or will we see further aggression in Moldova or elsewhere? You would often hear this from Ukrainians and supporters of Ukraine, that Putin won’t stop here, but what does that actually look like if he’s given everything he wants from Trump?

FIONA HILL

Well, it looks like what I just talked about, honestly. He’s already doing it. It’s undersea, deep sea cables. It’s potentially gas pipelines. It’s GPS satellites. It’s propaganda. It’s psychological operations. It’s cyber attacks. It’s already happening. There’s been assassinations. We haven’t even talked about assassinations and poisonings. There’s an inquest going on in the UK right now about the death of Dawn Sturgess, who was the woman in Salisbury in England, the famous cathedral town, that the members of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence unit, visited to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter, Yulia, and was also going to put the entire population of that town at risk with Novichok, the weapons grade nerve agent, in a small perfume bottle. The agents discarded the perfume bottle, which had enough to kill everybody in Salisbury, into the donation container for a charity shop. Dawn Sturgess’s partner found that, sprayed them both with the perfume. He was seriously ill, and she died.

So this is the kind of thing they do. And, of course, before that, there was Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with polonium, essentially a dirty bomb with polonium, spread radioactive material all the way around London. Assassinations in Germany, all kinds of sabotage attacks, DHL flights, warehouse fires. We’ve got case after case of Bulgarians and Serbs and all kinds of others being recruited by Russian intelligence for assassinations, going against Christo Grozev from pioneering journalistic intelligence group and others; Eliot Higgins and all the people who helped Navalny uncover the plots against him, the poisoning of Navalny, the killing of Navalny; and hostage-taking. We’ve got Evan Gershkovich from the Wall Street Journal, I think he’s writing a book about his experience there. But so many people, journalists and ordinary people, who’ve been taken hostage by Russia on visits. I mean, there’s still people in Russian prisons there.

All of this is happening all the time, and he can certainly step up the tempo. He doesn’t have to send a tank across the bridge at Narva in Estonia, for example. It’s all happening all the time, everywhere, all at once. And Putin’s already emboldened, and there’s going to be more of this. And even if it’s not Russian GRU agents, as I said, there’s an ability to basically take on criminals from sympathetic Slavic countries, for example, or others, in fact, if the price is right. So we’re in the middle of it, and it’s not just thinking that something will happen after the fact. I mean, the Ukrainians are absolutely right that Europe is under siege as well, but it has been for an absolutely long time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You mentioned earlier the convergence or the similarity in worldview between Trump and Putin, this belief that strongmen should be managing the world, that they should each have their sphere of influence and what each one does within it is not really the concern of others. If you imagine this playing out over the next few years, if Trump really does have something resembling a coherent approach here—and I realize that’s a big if—what does that world look like? What does that mean for the Russia-China relationship? What does that mean for the Russia-U.S. relationship going forward? Can you imagine this being a really durable change in how we think about global order?

FIONA HILL

Well, only if nobody else in the world has any agency, and that’s part of the problem. Next year is the 250th anniversary of the U.S. revolution and independence. And we seem to have gone from one king to a self-proclaimed king. And Trump is using—and the people around him—this idea of unitary executive to kind of recreate something that the United States cast off 250 years ago. But that’s obviously part of Trump’s worldview. He obviously sees himself as a king. I mean, I would take that literally. The way that he had the mock Time cover on the White House website. Just look at the White House website, and you can see exactly what it is that Trump would like the United States to be. Now, in the case of Russia, that gets back to our mindset. It’s not just the strongman, the spheres of influence, the sort of old-style imperialism. I mean, of course, we’re hearing a lot about McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt and all kinds of people that Trump never talked about before, but obviously he’s had a crash course in how they behaved and how they conducted themselves, like Andrew Jackson from the 1820s, as well.

But he’s going back to sort of an eighteenth-century style of governance, too. In the eighteenth century when Catherine the Great, who was an idol of Trump—of Putin’s rather—was ruling Russia—because Putin sees himself in a long line of czars and has taken the Russian presidency back to the czarist era, not a constitutional monarchy, a but monarchy with great powers. Well, he sees himself as a czar, if not a king. But in that period, the great powers of Europe were carving the players up among themselves. America at that point was a colony, or what was parts of America in that period up until the War of Independence, but in that same timeframe that the United States is getting its—or Americans are getting their—independence from Great Britain, Poland was being carved up by Russia with Catherine the Great pressuring Austria-Hungary without the Poles having any say in it whatsoever. And I think that that’s the vision, certainly, that Trump has. I’m not sure that Putin’s quite right there, or Xi is in China, but that’s basically what Trump is proposing. He’s, I think, misrepresenting or mis-assessing, if that’s a word, the strength of Russia and Russia’s ability to do that. But he’s not necessarily wrong about China. And basically what he’s proposing here is a kind of tripartite carving up of the world. It’s certainly what the rest of the world is assuming is what they want.

And, again, that could work, if it wasn’t for the fact that there are now eight billion people on the planet, that there are a whole host of other countries. There are 550 million people in Europe, who have all kinds of different modes of association. And there are rising powers like India, Brazil, and many others who want to have their role. And I was going to say on that, the nuclear powers now, because you’ve got Iran and North Korea that aspire to be nuclear powers. Obviously, countries like South Africa, Israel, India, and Pakistan are nuclear powers. You’ve got Japan and South Korea that are major economic powers. You’ve basically got a very complicated world out there. So you might have that model, and you might think you have the power to do this. And certainly Putin and Trump seem to have very generous estimates of their power, but that’s not the world that we’re in. We’re in a very complicated world. And they may try to do this, but I’m not sure that everyone else is going to cooperate.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There are others in Trump’s orbit who see the Russia relationship as really an opportunity to peel Russia away from China and to see it in that context. I’m not sure Trump would articulate it in exactly that way. Do you see any chance of eroding a Russia-China relationship that has really strengthened in ways that would’ve been hard to imagine a few years ago?

FIONA HILL

Yeah, I did years ago, and it was hard for me to imagine then. I wrote an article about this with a colleague, a former Australian diplomat based in the UK, Bobo Lo, who knows a lot about China and Russia as well. And years ago, we actually thought it was unlikely that they would be in this, what seems to be like a strategic partnership, because of all of these frictions and differences in perspective. But circumstances change, as we’ve seen. And Russia has become more dependent over the course of this war in Ukraine on China in ways that the Russians themselves would’ve resisted. And also Iran and North Korea. We couldn’t have envisaged four years ago, five years ago for sure, that Russia would be throwing in its lot with Iran and North Korea and offering them technical assistance with their various weapons programs, basically giving them an entry into the larger global politics and decreasing their isolation. I mean, that’s all come out of the sort of desperation of those initial failures of Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine.

And in terms of China now, the Russian relationship with China in terms of trade, reliance on China for technology, is so much more intensive than it was before. Trade has increased exponentially. A lot of it is one way, but Russia is relying very heavily now on China for the kind of technology that it got from other places before. Some of it is also being redirected. They’re still purchasing on the global marketplace, including from European companies, and they’re going through Turkey and Armenia and through China as well, all kinds of transshipments. But, I mean, the world has changed as a result of this. The war in Ukraine has been a pivotal war. In a way, it is World War III, and I’ve said that before as well, because everybody thinks of World War III, and when Trump thinks about it, he’s thinking “gambling with World War III,” he’s talking about nuclear armageddon. He’s made that very clear in the last few days. He’s very fixated on that. He genuinely does want to have arms control negotiations with Russia and with China, and again, with North Korea probably, but also with Iran, which he’s made very clear.

But, again, the world has become more complicated, and you’re going to have much more interest by other powers becoming nuclear powers. But the whole thing about a World War III–like scenario, putting the nuclear aspect of this to one side, is it’s a system-changing war or one that shows that conflict has broken out because the system has changed. Pax Americana had already ended, and this war was really one of the results of it, because Russia didn’t feel deterred by the state of play. It thought it could move in, no one cared about Ukraine. The United States had pulled out of Afghanistan. The United States was basically on the back foot, and it could basically swoop in and take advantage of all of that. And it didn’t really work as planned. And then China, North Korea, and Iran come in because they also think that the United States is on its way out. And if the United States is defeated in Ukraine, rather than Ukraine per se, then that’s basically a way of them putting the United States on the back foot.

I don’t think they reckoned on the United States basically saying, “Yep, yep, we see this is a proxy war. We don’t want any part of it. We’re not part of this at all. We’re off.” So this has actually, in many respects, again, thrown everything into some point of disarray. I imagine that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are going to have to recalculate, because, again, what I’ve said already is this now becomes a European war, where those countries are aiding and abetting Russia. And I’m not so sure that China will be able to take advantage of this in the way that it thought. I mean, China’s been telling the Ukrainians and the Europeans, “This isn’t about you. This is about the United States, and we’re not helping Russia to do something terrible in Europe or in Ukraine. It’ll all be fine. And now you’re having this rupture with the United States. We’ll be in there. We’ll help you rebuild.” Well, actually, they helped destroy. And if the United States has nothing to do with this, that’s going to be for them to negotiate this with the Europeans and explain themselves.

So the whole world has become extraordinarily complex now. This is the end of Pax Americana. The United States is heading off in, God knows what direction, fast and furious, rupturing relationships, economic, trade, political, military, left, right, and center, and I don’t think any of us know where it’s going to be in the future. The last time when we had the end of Pax Augustus, we ended up after a period of absolute chaos in the Roman world, with the Dark Ages. And I hope that’s not where we’re headed now, but if Europe responds, and I mean, European countries, because a lot of them do have the political will to respond to this, and find out a modus operandi, then that’ll be very different. And look, there’s Brazil. There’s India. There’s Pakistan. There’s Japan. There’s South Korea. There’s Australia. There’s New Zealand. There are so many countries out there who are in a very different place from what they were when we all began all of this 80 years ago. This is a very different world. It’s not just a world of three powers.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Listening to you and watching Trump’s interactions with Putin and with Zelensky and his statements on this whole set of issues over the last couple of months, it’s hard not to come back to this question, this enduring mystery of what is at the root of Trump’s attraction or fealty to Putin? As you look at it, is it all just that similarity of worldview, his kind of envy of Putin’s power? There are still people who, for all the overstatement of some of the Russiagate conspiracy theories last time around, who still believe there’s some degree of kompromat. But as you’ve watched this, how do you explain this in your mind? What is the root of this as you see it?

FIONA HILL

I think he’s fundamentally really enamored of Russia and doesn’t see it as a threat at all. And there’s a lot going around, as you said, about all these questions about what do the Russians or the Soviets have on him? All kinds of people are posting things all over the place about his first visits to Moscow in the Soviet Union, how he was hosted, as many others were, and how he was probably compromised then. I think he was very much enamored of the Soviet Union at the time. He’s very much in the 1980s realm, that period of the 1980s was when [Mikhail] Gorbachev comes in. And I went to study in Russia at the same time, 1987. I really thought that Russia was on a different trajectory. We have Gorbachev and Reagan meeting, you have the signing of the INF. You have this feeling that the whole place is changing, that they’re no longer clinging to the old communist ideology, that there’s new thinking in foreign policy. They all seem extraordinarily sympathetic. And this is a whole period of all the peace movements and people doing outreach. Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, everybody goes to Moscow in this period.

And of course, they’re going to be wining and dining an American businessman, and I’m sure that he really felt flattered because Trump always responds to flattery. And then we have Gorbachev. We have the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have [Boris] Yeltsin. Everybody thinks that the Russians have made a strategic choice. You have all these Russian business people emerging. Many of them invest in Trump’s businesses, buy his apartments. He meets all these oligarchs who are just like him: billionaires with beautiful wives, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t think he’s changed his view at all about Russia and the trajectory that it’s on. I don’t think he believes for one second that Putin has been out to get him. Just like with Gorbachev, who he wanted to sit down and basically negotiate nuclear weapons with, he sees Putin very similarly.

And in actual fact, though, Putin may be a KGB operative, Trump’s a total operative. He thinks in the same way: conspiracy theories, lies, these are all part of his coin of business as well. He’s a real estate mogul. I mean, I actually hadn’t pegged him for being an imperialist, but I think that I hadn’t probably taken his interest in real estate to its logical conclusion. It’s a great development of a literal greenfield site of Greenland. And he operates in the same sort of way as Putin. It’s one of the reasons why they don’t want to clamp down on disinformation here in the United States. They don’t want to clamp down on money in politics, because it’s extraordinarily useful for Trump. Trump and Putin are working in parallel tracks.

And again, Trump doesn’t basically have any respect for anyone apart from himself or people who he thinks are his peers. And the people who he thinks are his peers are a very small number of people. Putin’s one of them. Xi is another. The queen was one, but she’s gone now. He’s got the richest man in the world operating as his tech support, according to his t-shirt—Elon Musk. How more powerful could he possibly be?

And so that’s the way that he’s thinking about this. He thinks of Putin as an extraordinarily powerful individual. He’s got name recognition, face recognition. Even Americans who can’t tell one U.S. Senator or one member of the cabinet from the other recognize Putin. They know who he is. Elon Musk is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, and so is Trump. And that’s how he thinks about things. And so of course he’s compromised. Of course he’s an asset, because he can be manipulated. He can be flattered. People are always coming up to me and getting really angry with me because they’ll say, “Well, what have the Russians got on him?” We’ve all got stuff on him. I mean, for God’s sake, there’s been 90 cases, basically in courts against him. He’s already been found guilty on some charges. So come on. I mean, it’s more about the flattery. And the bigger and more important you are, and the more you flatter him, the more impact that has.

And as I said, Putin is always extraordinarily clever, even though, in fact, he does make fun of him in Russian. And Putin is always saying nice things about Trump. And so as Trump doesn’t believe in the interference—he’d rather believe it was Ukraine, or he doesn’t believe that there was a real Russian effort on his behalf—that’s why he says that he and Putin have been through so much together. It’s almost like a teenage romance where everybody’s been trying to keep them apart, and he just wants to get back together with Putin in spite of everybody. And he’s doing whatever he absolutely can to have that sit-down with him.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Could you share just one of those examples of Putin making fun of Trump in Russian?

FIONA HILL

Well, one of the classics was in Osaka at the G-20, which is also another famous incident where the Russians swapped out the interpreter for a very attractive, very skilled young woman. During that moment, they were standing off and chest-beating about who had hypersonic missiles first. And Trump was saying he would get them, and Putin was basically somewhat sarcastically saying, ”Yes, you will, but I’ve got them first,” kind of thing.

And then they started talking about Israel. And we did have this really amazing, historic meeting among the national security advisers of Israel, Russia, and the United States. It came around this time, because at that point, the Russians were trying to make the case that they were protecting Israel and being supportive of Israel by being in the Golan Heights and the activities that were doing in Syria.

And Putin was talking about this, and then Trump said, “Ah, but I do more for Israel than anybody else. They’ve named this after me and that after me in Israel.” And Putin looked at him and said, “Well, Donald, perhaps they should name the country after you.” And the way that he said it in Russian, it was so sarcastic. And you could see his guys around him smirking. But when the interpreter, who was the only person that Trump was looking at, basically said it, it just came out as more—sort of softer. And Trump responded and said, “Oh, no, I think that would be too much,” almost as if it was a genuine suggestion.

And there were other things like this where Putin would deliberately set him off, goading him to say terrible things about fellow Americans, be it Biden or Senator [Elizabeth] Warren, who he would call Pocahontas also to Putin. And, look, I mean, honestly, I found that shocking, and I talked about that publicly, and I said it in written materials, too. When your president throws you under the bus with a foreign leader, who really doesn’t care for you in the slightest, it tells you something. Because basically what Trump always wanted to be was the big, strong guy in front of Putin, and he does that by beating up on the people he can beat up on. He takes on very deliberately, very strategically people who he doesn’t think are going to fight back, which of course, Zelensky actually did in the Oval Office, or people that he can humiliate and look weak to look stronger to the other person. And it’s obvious to Putin he’s doing that. Let’s just be frank. It’s pretty obvious because it’s obvious to everybody else as well.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

To close, I just want to quickly go back to that 2021 essay you wrote, “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory.” The core argument of that piece is really not about Putin or Russia or even U.S.-Russian relations; it’s about the United States, in a way that seemed perhaps a bit provocative at the time, but has, I think, proved quite enduring and farsighted. You wrote that rather than Russia becoming more like us, the United States becoming more like Russia. And quoting you here, “Putin realized that despite the lofty rhetoric that flowed from Washington about democratic values and liberal norms, beneath the surface, the United States was beginning to resemble his own country: a place where self-dealing elites had hollowed out vital institutions and where alienated, frustrated people were increasingly open to populist and authoritarian appeals.” I suppose I’d close just by saying that we seem to be going in the wrong direction, not reversing those trends in any meaningful way.

FIONA HILL

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I mean, there was a great deal of discussion at various points about convergence. It was called convergence theory between America and the Soviet Union. And, again, in the 1980s, we thought that they were coming towards us. That certainly seemed to be the case. But over time, we’ve moved in their direction—look, for all kinds of obvious reasons. And the thing is that Putin is pretty smart, and he did recognize that, because Putin knows the dynamics within his own country, and he recognized them, obviously, in the United States, and he knew exactly then how to push buttons, which they’ve been doing for a long time. I mean, basically what the Russians do and why their propaganda is so effective is they surf a wave that’s already there. They don’t try to create things. And after a certain point, they just sit back and see this happening.

And while they think that we’re really weak, we’re not really going to get anywhere in terms of resolving issues. They do think that we’re weak. I mean, I remember my interactions with Ambassador Antonov, the previous Russian ambassador to the United States, when I would challenge him, as I was supposed to do in my position, about Russian interference in the elections, and he would say, “Ms. Hill, do you really think that America was such a banana republic, that you are so weak that you would be susceptible to this?” And he was just basically telling me that that’s what he thought. And unfortunately, that seems to be where we are.

And I still get screeds of emails from people screaming at me about these kinds of things and saying that we don’t see the situation, that this is really about America being strong. But that’s not what Russia thinks, and that’s not what Putin thinks. And the only way to really get peace is to show that you are strong and resilient, and to show that you are able to withstand all these kinds of provocations, and to restore deterrence. And it doesn’t mean by being on a war footing with Russia. It absolutely doesn’t mean that, but it means that you’re shoring up your own social cohesion, your own unity.

And unfortunately, President Trump is focused on disunity, on playing to his base, which is not as considerable as it looks like from the outside. I mean, basically two-thirds of the American population didn’t really vote for him, because not everybody voted. So this is a base that he can operate from, but it isn’t a base of unity, and he hasn’t been a force for unity. And while there is disunity and discord and Americans are being pitted against each other and he’s dismantling the state, this is like shock therapy. This is what Russia went through in the 1990s. It’s what the U.K. went through in the 1980s, or East Germany went through also in the 1990s, dismantling the public sector. There will be ample opportunity for Russia to continue to push buttons that make things worse. If we want to really resolve this, we have to do something different.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We will end on that warning. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you so much for the wonderful and truly trenchant pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs over the last few years.

FIONA HILL

Thank you so much, Daniel. Thanks for having me.