Lex Fridman PodcastFiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump | Lex Fridman Podcast #335
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,340 words- 0:00 – 1:19
Introduction
- FHFiona Hill
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, 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 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 act accordingly, or, you know, take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something.
- LFLex Fridman
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 Is Nothing For You Here. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill.
- 1:19 – 12:05
Education and career
- LFLex Fridman
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?
- FHFiona Hill
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'd gone down the mines. His father had gone down the mines at 13. His great-grandfather, you know, around the same kind of age. I mean, you had a lot of people, you know, at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, you know, 14. They didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, "Hey, you're gonna go down the mine like everybody else in your family." And then he didn't really have any other qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So he worked in a steelworks, that didn't work out. A brick works, 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 gonna 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
... rather than a boy. There was no expectation that I would go into industry.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
Uh, there was, you know, uh, some kind of idea that maybe I, you know, if I got qualifications I could be a nurse. My mother was a midwife-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
... and so she'd, at age 16 left school and gone to train, you know, as a, as a nurse and then as a midwife. I had other relatives who'd gone to teach, you know, in, in local schools and so there was an idea that, you know, women could get educated, uh, 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, you know, I was trying to sort of find my way through life and looking forward.
- LFLex Fridman
First of all, what does that even look like, uh, 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?
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah. There were, I mean there were a number of things. I mean, I think like a lot of kids, you know, you, you talk to people and particularly from blue collar backgrounds, say, "What did you want to do?" Boys might say, "I wanted to be a fireman." You know, or you go, you know kind of... I, 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
... 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, 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, uh, about a vet called James Herriot, um, that became here in the United States as well and was a sort of TV miniseries. He'd written a book and he was the vet for my, uh, one of my, uh, 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
... and he'd got his hand stuck in the cow was kicking him and I thought, "Yeah. Maybe, maybe not actually."
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- FHFiona Hill
"No, I don't think I want to be a vet."
- LFLex Fridman
That's interesting.
- FHFiona Hill
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, you know, pep talks for kids in these, you know, deprived areas. He had been, uh, quite prominent in local education and now he was a member of Parliament. He himself had come from a really hard scrabble 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 gonna 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 to do something. Most people around me, I didn't, I knew didn't have careers. I mean, my dad didn't really have a career, he had jobs. My mum, you know, thought of her nursing as a career though, I mean, and it genuinely was. And she was out there trying to help women, uh, survive childbirth. My mother had these horrific stories, you know, basically over the dining room table. I wished she'd stop. She'd leave out her nursing books and I- I tell you-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
... if everyone had had my mum as a, as a mother there'd be no, there'd be no reproduction on the planet.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. (laughs)
- FHFiona Hill
It was just these grim, horrific stories of breached 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, you know, I don't necessarily want to go in that, um, in that direction." But it was the timing that really cinched things for me. I was very lucky that the region I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive decline, de-industrialization and the complete collapse of, uh, the local government system, uh, around me, still maintained money for education, and they also paid for exchanges. And we had exchange programs with, uh, cities in Germany and France, also in Russia, in Kostroma, near Yaroslavl, um, for example. An old textile town similar, you know, down in its like kind of region but, you know, quite historic in, uh, the Russian context. In fact, the original, uh, bir- birthplace of the Romanov dynasty, um, in Kostroma, just as County Durham, you know, was quite a distinguished historic area in the, 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 stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate, uh, nuclear weapons in, uh, Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War. And this Euro Missile Crisis over SS-20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977, so when I was about 11 or 12, you know, all the way through into, uh, the later part of the 1980s. And in 1983, we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict. It was very much a, a another re-run 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, you know, after the fact, but the tension was palpable. But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises, uh, Operation, uh, 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 off a whole set of literal chain reactions, um, in the Soviet Union. Eventually it was recognized that, you know, all of this was really based on misperceptions. And of course, you know, 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 us as a teenager, you know, we were basically being prepped the whole time for, um, 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 you know, my house was so small, they said, "Look for a, a room without a window." There were no rooms without windows. My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window, (laughs) you know-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
... and said if there was a, a nuclear flash, you know, we'd have to, you know, get down on the floor and not look up but the curtains would help. And we're like, "This is ridiculous Dad." And then we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the, uh, space under the stairs, a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter, and it was all just, you know, totally nuts. Or go, or you had to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside. And I thought, "Well this, this isn't gonna 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?"
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- FHFiona Hill
Because, you know, during the-
- LFLex Fridman
Go talk to 'em. (laughs)
- FHFiona Hill
Exactly. During World War II-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
... 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, uh, 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 I had visions of myself sitting around, you know, listening to things in a big headset and you know, basically translating perhaps at some, you know, future arms control summit.
- 12:05 – 20:23
Donbas in the 20th century
- FHFiona Hill
And then I kind of thought to myself, "Well, how do I, how do I study Russian?" Because there, there were very few schools in my, uh, region, you know, given the impoverishment of the region, uh, 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, um, 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 Donbas going back to the 1920s.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- FHFiona Hill
And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots of contacts between, you know, 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, uh, the Russian Empire and the old industrial areas. Basically, big industrial areas like the North East of England and places like Donbas were built up at the same time often by the same sets of industrialists. And Donetsk, uh, in the Donbas region used to be called Huzivka because it was established by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales, uh, to help, um, you know, kind of develop the coal mines there and also the, the steelworks and others that, you know, we're hearing about all the time. And so I got very fascinated in all these linkages. And, you know, famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union like Yevgeny Zamyatin, uh, worked in the shipyards in, um, Newcastle upon Tyne. And there was just this whole set of connections. And in 1984, when the miners' strike, uh, took place, the miners of Donbas along with other miners from, uh, famous coal regions like the Ruhr, uh, Valley, for example, in Germany or miners in Poland sent money and solidarity to the miners of County Durham. And there had been these exchanges, as I said, going back and forth since the ni- 1920s, formal exchanges between miners, you know, of the region and the miners' unions. And I, um, heard, again from the same, uh, great uncle who had told me to, uh, 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, uh, called Redhills where the, uh, 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, uh, talk among themselves to figure out how to enhance the welfare and wellbeing 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, you know, were involved in some of these writers' circles in other parts of, uh, Britain in mining communities, for example. And so, uh, they told me I could, you know, go along and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian. So I show up, and it was the easiest, you know, application I've ever come across. They just asked me to, uh, my dad came along with me. They asked me to verify, you know, that my dad had been a miner, and they looked up his employment record on little cards, you know, kind of in a little, a little tray somewhere. And then they asked me how much I needed, you know, to, uh, basically pay for the travel and some of the, um, basic expenses for the, um, the study, and they wrote me a check. And so thanks to the miners of Donbas and this money that was deposited with the miners of, uh, County Durham with the Durham Miners Association, I got the money to study Russian for the first time, uh, before I en- embarked on my studies at university.
- LFLex Fridman
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, um, you know, this is an industrial region.
- FHFiona Hill
That's right.
- LFLex Fridman
And it echoes in... The experience of living there is more captured not by Moscow or Kyiv but by, at least historically, by just being a mining town, an industrial town, so-
- FHFiona Hill
That's right, in the place itself.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah. I mean, there are places in the United States, in Appalachia, in West Virginia, and in Pennsylvania like the Lehigh Valley that have the same sense of place. And the North East of England, you know, was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. It was the industrial version of the silic- 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, you know, someone from the working class, the blue-collar communities from a very specific place with lots of historical and economic, uh, connotations. And it's also a melting pot which is the problems that the Donbas has experienced, uh, over, you know, the last, uh, 30 years as people came from all over the place to work there. Of course, there was a, a population that one might say is indigenous, you know, might have gone back centuries there. But they would have been, you know, in the smaller rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the North East of England. And people, in the case of the North East of England, came from Wales, they came from further, the South of England, the Midlands, they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland. Um, 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 ident- an identity li- uh, on you from the outside that things go awry. And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in, uh, the case of, uh, Donbas. It's a place that's apart in many respects historically and in terms of its evolution and development over time. And, you know, particularly in the case of, you know, Russia, uh, the Russians have tried to say, "Well, look, you know, because most people speak Russian there as the lingua franca..." I mean, in the North East 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, um, uh, 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 a- an identity. It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster, you know, the northern province of, um, of the, you know, the whole of the Irish, um, Ireland, you know, the part of, uh, Ireland that is still part of the United Kingdom. That was also a, a heavily industrialized area, um, high, um, manufacturing, mass manufacturing, shipbuilding, for example. People came from all over there too, which is why when Ireland, uh, got its independence from the United Kingdom...... Ulster, Belfast, and that whole region, you know, it kind of clung on because it was, again, that melting pot. It was kind of inter- 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, uh, to study there, I actually went to a translators institute, what was then called the Morris Torres, which is now the Institute of, uh, Foreign Languages.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
Um, 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 had 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 a quite a, uh, a distortion on the way that people looked at the world.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you still speak Russian?
- FHFiona Hill
I do, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Вы по-русски говорите?
- FHFiona Hill
Да, можно. Конечно. Если хотите.
- LFLex Fridman
А, ну да. Тогда мне надо что- что-нибудь сказать, и все будут думать: "О чем мы сейчас говорим?"
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody. And you have an advantage on me because it's your native language as well.
- LFLex Fridman
For people wondering, the, the English speakers in the audience, you're really missing a lot from the few sentences we said there. Um, yeah, it's, it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across a very large part of this world.
- 20:23 – 30:58
Soviet Union
- LFLex Fridman
So there you are in 1987, an exchange student in the Soviet Union. What was that world, world like?
- FHFiona Hill
Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period because it's the period, um, that's just around the time of the peak of perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev's, uh, role as president. Um, well he wasn't quite president at that point, he was still Secretary-General of the Sov- of, uh, 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. It was just within, you know, kind of weeks of them, uh, 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, you know, basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces. And 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. Um, not just, you know, in Moscow, which is where I was studying at the translators institute, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia. I went all the way to, uh, Khabarovsk in the, uh, the Russian Far East, all the way around, you know, kind of Moscow. And there was, uh, uh, at this point it was also the, uh, Kreschenie Rus', which has become very important now. This was the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of, um, of Russia, uh, which of course has become a, a massive obsession of, uh, Vladimir Putin's. But, you know, 988, uh, 'cause I was there '87 to '88. And at this point, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period. You suddenly have the church stepping out as a, a non-governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. Uh, so that, um, uh, was, you know, something that I wasn't expecting to, to witness. Also, I mean, being in Moscow, this is the cultural capital of, a 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. You know, I'd, I'd ... The first time I go to 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're kind of growing up in a, in a mining region, you know, there, 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 for obviously everything, you know, they possibly could education wise. But it wasn't exactly any exposure to this. So, you know, I was kind of astounded by the, the sort of wealth of, uh, 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'd, I'd got this image about what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first about what I would see there, you know, the big nuclear superpower. And since 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 was just ordinary people in an ordinary place-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
... not doing great. This is the period of, you know, what they call Deftistnye Vremya, you know, so the period of deficits. Where there was no food in the shops.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
There was, you know, very little in terms of commodities because the, um, supply and demand parts of the economic equation were out of whack because there was just total central planning. You know, you'd go into, you know, a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pair of boots, all in the same size and the same color. I actually lucked out because once I was in this, um, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- FHFiona Hill
And they were all women's boots. (laughs) There were no men's boots at all, you know, 'cause there was been an oversupply of boots in 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 had lost their jobs. There was massive unemployment. 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, you know, kind of months out of, uh, leaving school. And so shops were closing 'cause people didn't have any money. You know, I had 50% male unemployment in, um, some of the towns as the steel works closed down and the, uh, the wagon works for the railways, for example, in my area. But in Moscow, people, in theory, did have money, but there was just, 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, you know, one accident after another.... and then there was, you know, this real kind of sense, even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope of the Gorbachev period, a real sense that the, uh, the Soviet Union had lost its way. And, of course, it was only, uh, a year or so after I left from that exchange program, and I'd 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, you know, no one was in agreement. And it was basically all these fights and, uh, de- debates and disputes among the elites at the center as well as, you know, basically a loss of faith in the system in the periphery and among the general population that, in fact, pulled it apart. And, and of course, in 1991, you get, um, 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, uh, the Soviet Union, getting together and agreeing of essentially ending it. And Gorbachev, you know... So basically I'm there at the, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, I wonder if we re-ran the 20th century a thousand times if... How many times the Soviet Union would collapse.
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah. I wonder about that too, and I also wonder about what would've happened if it didn't collapse and Gorbachev had found a different direction.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, as you know, we see a very divisive time now in American history. The United States of America has very different cultures, very different, uh, beliefs, ideologies within those states, but those are... That's, that's kind of the strength of America is there's these little laboratories of ideas.
- FHFiona Hill
Until though, that they don't keep together. I mean, I've had colleagues who have described what's happening in the US right now as a kind of soft secession with states, you know, going off in their own direction-
- LFLex Fridman
In, well, in-
- FHFiona Hill
... and the center not
- NANarrator
holding.
- LFLex Fridman
In which states? (laughs)
- FHFiona Hill
Well-
- LFLex Fridman
What-
- FHFiona Hill
... the, you know, the, these kinds of conceptions that we have now of divisions between red and blue states-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
... 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, um, you know, many other countries as well because there wasn't that ethnic-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
... um, d- uh, dimension. But in fact, many of our... The way that people talk about politics has, has given it that kind of appearance in many respects. 'Cause 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 signify of identity and that identity can take all kinds of, uh, of other forms.
- LFLex Fridman
That's really interesting. I mean, but there has to be a deep grievance of some kind. If you took a poll in any of the states in the United States, I think a very small minority of people would want to actually secede, uh, even in Texas where I spend a lot of my time.
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I, I just... I think that there is a common kind of pride of nation. You know, there's, um... 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."
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
But really what they mean is, "We're in this muck together." There's a together there that I-
- FHFiona Hill
I, I, I also feel that when I go around 'cause, I mean, I've spent a lot of time since I wrote, um, my book in... last October. In this last year going around, I find, 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, um, a really good book called Collapse by Vladyslav Zubok, who is a, a professor, um, at, um, uh, London, uh, School of Economics at LSE. And Zubok is pretty much my age, and he's from, you know, the former Soviet Union. He's Russian. And, I mean, he describes it very quite aptly about how it was kind of the elites, you know, that basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart. And there is a risk of that, you know, here as well when you get partisan politics and people forgetting, you know, they're Americans and they are all in this together like a lot of the population thing. But they think that their own, you know, narrow, partisan, or ideological precepts, you know, count for more. And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also a power play, you know, in a, in a way that actually can't quite play out in the United States because it was the equivalent of governors in many respects who got together, three of them, you know, in the, in the case of, um, uh, the heads of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, who then, you know, got rid of, uh, you know, basically the central, um, the central figure of, 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 was... I spent, you know, a lot of time in the, uh, in, in Russia, uh, as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus, Central Asia, and, you know, other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, uh, you, you kind of see the same elite divisions here in the United States pulling in, you know, in different, uh, in different directions and straining, you know, the overall body politic and the, the way that national politics gets imposed on local politics in ways that I... 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, and, you know, obviously race was, was a major phenomenon here that was a shock to me when I, when I first came. But many of the kind of the class regional, geographic, you know, kind of political dimensions that I've seen in other places, I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now.
- LFLex Fridman
And you take a lot of pride to this day of being non-partisan. That said...So
- 30:58 – 42:58
Donald Trump's foreign policy
- LFLex Fridman
you served, uh, for the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations, uh, always specializing in, uh, 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, uh, 2019 saying, "I take great pride in the fact that I'm a nonpartisan foreign policy expert." So given that context, what does nonpartisan mean to you?
- FHFiona Hill
Well, it means being very careful about not putting any kind of ideological lens on anything, you know, that I'm analyzing or looking at or saying about foreign policy for one thing. But also not taking, you know, kind of one stance of one party over another either. To be honest, I've, I've always found, um, American politics somewhat confounding-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
... because both the Democratic and the Republican Party are pretty big tents. I mean, they're coalitions, you know. In, in Europe it's actually kind of, in some respects, easier to navigate-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- FHFiona Hill
... the parameters of political parties because you, you have quite clear platforms. Um, you know, there's also a longer history in many respects, obviously. I mean, there's a long history here in the United States of the development of the parties, you know, going back to the late 18th century. But in the United, uh, Kingdom, you know, for example, in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties, you know, 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, um, that western Germany of course, Italy and, and, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
At one point he's a Democrat, next thing he's a Republican.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
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, 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, on the left, you know, basically calling himself a socialist and, you know, running for the, the Democratic, uh, presidential nomination. So, you know, kind of in many respects, parties in the United States are much more loose movements. And I think you can, you know, it's almost like a kind of an à la carte menu of, of different things and, uh, that people can pick apart, pick out. And it's more over time as I've noticed, um, become more like a kind of an affiliation even with a sporting team.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
I mean, I, I get very shocked by the way that people say, "Well, I couldn't do this because, you know, 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, a relative in my extended, um, family here who, um, is a, is a, um, you know, dyed-in-the-wool Republican and on, you know, family holiday there was a book on their table. It said, "100 reasons for voting for a Democrat." And I said, "Hey, are you, um, thinking of shifting party affiliation?" Then I opened the book and it's blank. (laughs) It was pretty funny. I had to laugh.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- FHFiona Hill
I thought, "Well, there you go then." (laughs) You know, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
I think you can be politically engaged on the issues. But, you know, basically without taking, uh, a stance that's defined by some ideologic- ideology or some sense of kind of partisan affiliation.
- LFLex Fridman
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, uh, you're not thinking about ideas, you just picked a tribe." I mean, it was more eloquent than that. But it, it was, um, it's basically, this is a really good test to see are you actually thinking about, like, how to solve problems versus, like, you're a red team or blue team like a sporting team. Can you find a-
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... g- good idea of Donald Trump's that you like if you're somebody who's against Donald Trump and, like, acknowledge it to yourself privately, "Oh, that's a good idea. I'm glad he said that." And like-
- FHFiona Hill
Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions, which he often did actually. I mean, obviously he 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. Say, "Yeah, actually, why are we doing that?" And then you have to in- really inspect it and say whether it's actually worth continuing that way or that you should be doing something differently. Now, he had a more kind of destructive quality to those kinds of questions, you know, about maybe it's the real estate developer in him that was, you know, taking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of, you know, 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 gonna do in response, but those questions still had to be asked and we shouldn't be just rejecting them, you know, out of turn.
- LFLex Fridman
And, you know, the, then another strength, the thing that people often... they criticize Donald Trump will say is a weakness is, is, uh, lack of civility can be a strength. Because I, I feel like sometimes bureaucracy functions on excessive civility. Like, uh, actually I've seen this. It's not just... it's bureaucracy in all forms. Like, um, in tech companies as they grow everybody kind of, you know, you're getting pretty good salary. Everyone's is, is ev- uh, 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, um, un... 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.
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
That's why Steve Jobs worked. It's why Elon Musk works. You have to roll in... That's what first principles thinking looks like.
- FHFiona Hill
The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name-calling-... you know-
- LFLex Fridman
Sure.
- FHFiona Hill
... kind of inciting violence against-
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- FHFiona Hill
... you know, the people that we disagree with.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes. Yes.
- FHFiona Hill
So that was kind of a problem because-
- 42:58 – 49:49
Testifying against Donald Trump
- LFLex Fridman
Um, 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 it?
- FHFiona Hill
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
I came to the United States with all of these expectations of what the place would be. I'd already been disabused of, you know, some of the, um, let's just say, rosy, uh, perspectives I had of the United States. I'd been shocked by, uh, the depths of racial problems isn't, doesn't even sum up the problems we have in the United States. I mean, I- I couldn't get my head around it when I first came. I mean, I'd, I'd read about, you know, slavery and American history, but I hadn't fully fathomed in a really the kind of the way that was ripping apart the United States. I mean, I'd read Alexis de Tocqueville, and he'd commented on this, and it obviously had, you know, kind of changed to the expect, the way that one would have expect all this time, you know, from the 18th, you know, century onwards. So that was kind of one thing that, you know, that I realized that the civil rights, uh, movement and all of these, you know, acts of expansion of suffrage and everything else were imperfect at best, you know. And I was born in '65, the same, same time as the Civil Rights Act, and there's a heck of a long way still to go. So I wasn't, let's just say, you know, as starry eyed about everything as I'd been before, but I really saw an incredible competence and professionalism in, you know, the US government. It was... You know, and the, and the election system and the integrity of it. And I, I mean, I really saw that. I saw that the United States was the gold standard for, you know, kind of some of its, you know, 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 had, um, had faced in its just whole botched, uh, analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of, um, well, honestly, a crime in my view of invading Iraq and... Uh, but the way that people were trying to, to deal with that in the aftermath. I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council, the DNI, the directorate, uh, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong in, uh, the whole analysis about Iraq in 2003, you know, 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, you know, just really genuine striving and, 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 it any other way, just totally crazy looking glass, thinking of, you know, Alice in Wonderland, Alice through the looking glass version of American politics.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
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, uh, 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, I mean, a lot of the people that I, I worked 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'd, uh, really bought into and, uh, tried to uphold in the United States, uh, government and in the things that we were trying to do with me and my colleagues was just being thrown out the window. And that, you know, I would have to step up in defense of them and in defense of my colleagues who were being lambasted and, you know, criticized and given death threats for actually standing up and doing their own jobs.
- LFLex Fridman
In particular on the topic of Ukraine?
- FHFiona Hill
Uh, uh, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
And seeing non-partisan government officials being attacked from all sides, left and right and, uh, but especially the right, and being basically accused of being partisan hacks, you know, deep state-
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- FHFiona Hill
... uh, coup plotters, you know, you name it. Their, um, patriotism being questioned as well. And a lot of people I worked with in government, like myself, naturalized Americans, a lot of them were immigrants, many were refugees, and many people had fought in, in wars, uh, on behalf of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan being blown up. And, you know, they, they'd put their lives on the line. They'd put their family lives on the line, you know, because they believed in America. And they were just, they were reflections of Americans from all kinds of works of, walks of life. It's what really made, you know, that cliche of America great. It wasn't, you know, whatever it was that was being, you know, 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 going to make a go of it and that they're going to, you know, try to work towards the whole, you know, idea of the preamble of the Constitution towards a more perfect union. And I, you know, 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 and, uh, people's, you know, whole careers, which were not just careers for their own self-aggrandizement, but for 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 gonna let that happen." Because, you know, I've, I've come from a... Well, if they're 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 gonna let this happen. I've made this choice to come to America. I'm all in, and, and these guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots (laughs) -
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
... and they're ruining it. You know, they're ruining it for everybody.
- LFLex Fridman
So the personal attacks on, 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, uh, people that s- that, you know, work on viruses, work on-
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah, and they're going around-
- LFLex Fridman
... vaccines.
- FHFiona Hill
... and, uh, you know, b- basically, um, with protective gear on in case somebody shoots them in the street.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
That's just absurd.
- LFLex Fridman
But-...let me zoom out from the individual people.
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And actually look at the situations that we saw in the, in the, the George W. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump presidencies. And I'd like to sort of criticize each, uh, by the, not the, the treatment of individual people, but by the results.
- FHFiona Hill
Right. Yeah. I think that's fair. Yeah.
- 49:49 – 1:11:23
US administrations
- FHFiona Hill
- LFLex Fridman
So, 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, uh, smart, hardworking, well-intentioned people, how do we, as a system, uh, make mistakes in foreign policy? So, uh, the, the big mistake, uh, you can characterize in different ways, but George W. Bush is invading Iraq-
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah, that's a key thing.
- LFLex Fridman
...or maybe how it was invaded or maybe how the decision process was made to invade it. Uh, a- again, Afghanistan with, uh, b- maybe not the invasion, but details around, uh, like having a plan about, you know, how to withdraw. All that kind of stuff. Then Barack Obama, to me, similarly, is, is, is a man who came to fame early on for being somebody who was against, uh, a rare voice against the invasion of Iraq, which was actually a m- a brave thing to do at that time. And nevertheless, he, and, I mean, I don't know the numbers, but I think he, uh, was the president for eight years over increased drone attacks-
- FHFiona Hill
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
...incre- like, every- everything, uh, from a foreign policy perspective, uh, the, the military industrial complex, that machine grew in power under him, not shrunk, and did not withdraw from Afghanistan. Uh, and then, uh, with Donald Trump, the criticisms that you're presenting sort of, uh, the, the personal attacks, the chaos, the partisanship of people that are supposed to be non-partisan. So, the, you know, if you j- sort of just steel man the chaos, to, to (laughs) 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 gonna be very upset with that because it's a wrench. It's not, it's not... It's an inefficient process, but maybe it leads, uh, for government, it forces the, the system as a whole, not the individuals, but the system to reconsider how things are done. So obviously, all of those things, uh, the actual results are not that impressive.
- FHFiona Hill
You could have done that-
- LFLex Fridman
But-
- FHFiona Hill
...on the latter. Um, you know, shaking things up because I'm all one for questioning and trying to shake things up as well and do things differently.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- FHFiona Hill
Um, but, you know, the question is if you bring the whole system down with nothing, uh, ideas of putting it into place. Look, I mean, um, like many people, I've studied the Bolshevik Revolution and, you know, many others as well. And, you know, kind of what's, uh, 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, and only yourself to want to be President of the United States, for example. We see that in, you know, many of our presidents have been narcissists to different, you know, kind of degrees. You think about Lenin, you know, for example, and people can go back and read about Lenin. He formed his views when he was about 18 and he never shic- shook them off.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
He never evolved. He, he, he didn't have any kind of diversity of thought. And, uh, and when systems go awry, it's when they don't bring in different perspectives. And so, you know, Trump, if he brought in different perspectives and actually listened to them and not just, you know, believed 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 the 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, you know, creating so much factionalism in American politics that, you know, people have forgotten they're Americans. They think that they're red or blue, you know, parts of teams. And, you know, if you go back over history, that's a kind of a recipe for, for war and, you know, internal conflict. If you go back to, you know, the Byzantine Empire, for example, there's a famous episode of the Nika riots, uh, in, uh, uh, Constantinople where the whole, uh, city gets trashed because the greens, the reds, the blues, and these, uh, 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, um, with, uh, Dick Cheney as the vice president being very fixated on it. And Obama, it's, you know, he and, you know, kind of the bright young things around him, you know, from... Uh, he, he himself is, you know, kind of intellectually, um, you know, one might, uh, say arrogant in many respects, you know. He was a very smart guy, and, you know, he's convinced that he has and he, he ruminates over a lot of things, but he's the person who makes, you know, a lot of the decisions. Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And, um, 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."
- FHFiona Hill
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
"It's just me and whatever it is that I 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, you know, the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of, you know, people out there. Like, you do that in science.
- FHFiona Hill
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, when... I mean, all of my friends and relatives are in science. They're, they've got these incredible collaborations with people, you know, across the world. I mean, how did we get to these, uh, vaccines for the COVID virus? Because of this incredible years of collaboration and of, you know, sharing results and sharing an ideas. And our whole system...
- FHFiona Hill
... has become ossified. You know, we think about the congressional system, for example, as well, and there's, you know, this kind of rapid, you know, turnover that you have in, uh, Congress every two years. You know, there's no incentive for people, you know, 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... You know, some do, you know, the gov- their constituents, but a lot of people don't. And the Senate, it's all kind of focused on the game of, uh, uh, of legislation, uh, for s- 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, you know, for the good of the country to push things along. And also, our government also d- is siloed. There's, there's not a lot of mechanisms for bringing people together. There ought to be, in 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... You know, we, we have it within the National Institutes of Health, but we saw the B- the CDC break down on this, you know, kind of front. We, we don't have sufficient of those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds. You know, and one of the other problems that we've, have with government, with the federal government, over, you know, state and local government, is it's actually quite small. People think that the federal government's huge-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- FHFiona Hill
... because, of course, we've got 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, who've kind of come up all the way over the last, you know, 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 they 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, uh, 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, uh, political consultancies, or they've gone to Silicon Valley, and they've g- they've gone to this place and that place. Because after a time, as a younger person, they're not, you know, 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 are like, "Oh, you know, public servants." They're not really public servants. There's this whole lack and loss, um, of a kind of a faith in public service. And, you know, the last few years have, have really done a lot of damage. We need to revitalize, uh, 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, the, 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, uh, management fellowships, and the White House fellows, and, uh, you know, bringing in, you know, scientists, uh, you know, from the outside, giving, you know, that, that kind of opportunity for collaboration that we see in other spheres.
- LFLex Fridman
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-
- FHFiona Hill
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... and, and creating a culture of, like, attracting the right... I mean, basically, chief hirer. When you, when you think of a CEO, like the great CEOs are... I mean, 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 at building a team, a credible team?
- FHFiona Hill
Well, we make it really difficult because of the political process. I mean, uh, and also because we have so many political appointments. We ought to have less, to be honest.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
I mean, w- if we look at other governments around the world, you know, that are smaller, it's much easier for them to hire people in.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- FHFiona Hill
You know, some of the most successful governments are much smaller. And it's not that I say that the, you know, the government is necessarily too big, but it's just thinking about each unit a- in a- 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, you know, with every single administration that we've had over the last, uh, 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, are being played. I know loads of people who have just been held up because it's just on the whim of, you know, some member of Congress, even though that the actual position that they want is really technical-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- 1:11:23 – 1:31:39
Impeachment of Donald Trump
- LFLex Fridman
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?
- FHFiona Hill
I think it weakened in many respects, just the way that it was conducted. I mean, there's a, there's, you know, 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, gave people a big, massive lesson in civics. Everyone's kind of-
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- FHFiona Hill
... running out and looking up the whole process of impeachment and what that meant, and kind of about 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. But it didn't ultimately show responsibility and accountability. And that in itself was kind of, was weakened because on, on, you know, both sides, there was a lot of partisan politics. Uh, I, I mean, I think that there was a, a dereliction of, of duty, uh, in many respects. I mean, especially, I have to say, on the part of Republican members of Congress, um, who were, you know, kind of, they should have been embracing, you know, Congress' prerogatives. You could've, you know, kind of basically done this in a, in something of a different way. But the whole thing is because it was th- 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, uh, the Republican side. I mean, there's a lot of grandstanding that I really didn't like one bit on the Democratic side either. And, and, and not admitting to mistakes, and, you know, not kind of addressing head-on, you know, the fact that they'd, you know, kind of been pushing for, you know, Trump to be impeached, and, you know, talking about him being an illegitimate president, you know, kind of right from the, the very beginning. And that, you know, as a result of that, a lot of people just saw this as kind of a continuation of, you know, political games, you know, coming out of, uh, the 2016 election. But on the Republican side, it was just a game. It was people I knew who were, you know, basically, you know, at one point one of them winked at me.
Episode duration: 3:19:24
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode vNhSCF9i8Qs
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome