Podcast
Trump, Putin, and Genghis
Khan
A Conversation With Fiona Hill
Published on May 7, 2026This is a rough transcript of the conversation. Please consult the underlying audio prior to citation.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Fiona, thanks so much for doing this. It’s great to have you back on The Foreign Affairs Interview.
FIONA HILL
Thanks, Dan. Great to be with you.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
We last spoke early in Trump’s second term on the podcast. The little more than a year since that conversation has brought plenty of, you could say, turbulence, whether it’s on relationships with allies or with adversaries. We have two wars with Iran, one of those ongoing, military raid in Venezuela, threats on Greenland, plenty else. I want to ask you a version of the question that I opened with last time. What has surprised you about the last year of Trump’s foreign policy?
FIONA HILL
I think actually I’ve had a bit of a failure of imagination for some of the things that he could possibly have done, and partly that is due . . . I think everybody’s been guilty of this of thinking about the framing of his first presidency and then also his campaign, this whole idea to eschew forever wars or military interventions. Obviously, he was elected to deal with the domestic side of things, and he’s transformed the United States in ways that he certainly didn’t even the first time around, because he’s got a second bite of that apple. But he’s really embraced the foreign policy dimensions of his presidency in some unexpected ways. Some I anticipated, but didn’t think he’d go quite as far as he did. Greenland, for example. I mean, we knew he was kind of somewhat personally obsessed with it, but to push to the point that he actually made the Danes think that he would invade, that’s going further than I would’ve really thought.
Coming on top of his certainly belligerent statements about Canada. I mean, I knew he didn’t like Canada or certainly didn’t like Justin Trudeau and seemed to have some kind of personal antipathy for a variety of different reasons, a lot of it related to security and economics. But it really just seems to think that, I mean, now that his real estate magnet mind and map has gone to a larger imperial mindset, which has gone beyond quite what I certainly expected. Then, of course, the war against Iran in the Gulf.
It was prefigured in the first term, there were lots of people pushing for it, but he himself was somewhat reluctant. The fact that nobody got across to him, the inevitability of the close of the Strait of Hormuz, the fact that he really just thinks he can roll the dice over and over again and that he will never have some kind of setback, I mean, that is even beyond what I’d anticipated. I certainly see him as a person who veers towards megalomania, narcissism, Messiah complex. We’ve seen all of this. He works in an uninhibited fashion, but there is just no constraints in him whatsoever. Even the markets no longer seem to be able to constrain him.
When he moves to the point that he’s taking on the Pope and he thinks that he himself, Donald Trump, is infallible and the Pope is fallible. And then he even goes beyond the dimensions of the way that he thinks about himself. I mean, we’ve seen in the last few weeks reports that he’s now thinking himself as a world historic individual. And actually, I think that’s correct. There’s been quite a few articles about this, and I listened to a podcast a little while ago of a couple of historians talking about it. And I think he’s definitely got himself into that territory, but of course that’s really troubling because he’s thinking about that in real time. That means that, in many respects, there are no bounds unless people start to impose them upon him, about what he is considering and what he actually might do next. That is a very worrying place for all of us to be.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
You spent probably more hours than you care to count in the first term talking to Trump about US adversaries, about allies, about American power. Do you think his view of American power and its role in the world has changed, or is this merely a matter of there being no constraints? I mean, there are moments in the last year where Trump, himself, almost seems surprised by just how much power the US has, especially if you’re not concerned about legitimacy or about husbanding it, or constraining it, for the sake of limiting opposition.
FIONA HILL
Well, I think he was more cautious then. It wasn’t just the constraints, the inhibitions around him, but I think what’s happened now, it’s that sense of him himself having unbridled power. That is a factor of everything that has happened; two failed impeachments, multiple efforts to try to contain him, the fact that he’s come back from political oblivion. Well, it should have been political oblivion, under normal circumstances, when he didn’t win for the second term immediately and has come back to a second non-consecutive term, having been in exile in Mar-a-Lago all this kind of time. For him, that’s the ultimate comeback. Of course, the assassination attempts on him, all of the accolades that he’s received from people, the fact that nobody ever really takes him on. And the people that do take him on, he kind of basically buffets away, I’m including the Pope.
That, I think, is obviously something pretty significant because I do think that he sees American power as an extension of himself. I don’t think he sees it as anything particularly separate, because it’s something that he is wielding in a way that other presidents, himself included when he was another president, were too cautious to use that kind of approach. I mean, he sees himself, I think, as invincible. That, again, is a major, major problem because we all know in history . . . Look, if we go back and start thinking about these historic figures who got into that same mindset, the definition of hubris, it usually ended pretty poorly. I mean, I think there are a few of those historical figures, perhaps Genghis Khan is the one who got away with it all. We’re all descendants of Genghis Khan, according to some historians and experts. He was the one that somehow sort of managed to keep on going, but everybody else has come to a bit of a bad end if we start to think about these dimensions.
The other thing is that Trump is now in that kind of phase where, I mean, everybody’s talking about legacy, but again, he doesn’t care about what happens after he’s gone. He’s trying to do everything in his own lifetime. Again, he’s just accelerating everything. He’s doing enormous damage to himself, although he will never see that, to the United States, and obviously to the world, because he’s actually basically involved himself in two system shifting, changing wars, one in Ukraine, not to a good end either. I mean, I think he’s kept that conflict going, honestly, by his own interventions. We now see Ukraine in a very different phase. I think that they’ve sort of given up on Trump and expecting anything of him. They’re basically moving beyond the United States, as other countries are trying to, and starting to at least contemplating that.
With Iran, he’s completely put the world on its head. There’s global ramifications for what’s happened there with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, showing if you have a choke point, as our colleague, Eddie Fishman, has pointed out to great effect in both his book and a recent Foreign Affairs article, you can really hold the world at ransom. Trump has facilitated that. He should have expected that Iran would do that, and he should have done something against it. But like Putin, he thought he was doing a special military operation, he rolled a dice and believed that nothing could possibly go wrong.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Do you find the analogies that some have drawn between Putin and Ukraine, and Trump and Iran to be persuasive and illuminating?
FIONA HILL
I do. I mean, the only thing is that the Ukrainians don’t have that a choke point, a choke hold that they can put on everybody. In a similar way, they’ve managed to bog down a giant, a much larger military power, in a place which is not on their home territory. I mean, the Russians think that Ukraine is home territory, but it’s really not. It’s always been that kind of frontier region of the empire, and same with Iran. I mean, the United States has been in the Middle East for an extraordinary long period of time. Of course, the standoff with Iran has been going on for 40-odd years, but this is not a place that advantages the US necessarily. I do see that. I mean, obviously Ukraine was not a threat to Russia, in the way that Iran was a threat to the United States and to larger global security. There’s no denying what Iran has done, viscous proxy wars, attacks on US interests, et cetera, et cetera. This is structurally, I think, very similar. So I think that analogy structurally really holds.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Do you agree with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Iran is humiliating Trump. Whether it was wise of Merz to say that is another question, but do you agree with that basic assessment?
FIONA HILL
Not wise for him to say it, but yes. I mean, I think the other thing in the way that Merz could have been referring to is all the memes. I mean, Iran has got an edge in the propaganda and AI space, as well in the information space, because people are watching all of these. I mean, I obviously check them out, I’m sure you have and many others have. Extraordinarily clever use of the public information space and making fun of Trump. That could have been what Merz is referring to because they’re using, in a way, his strengths against him and his weaknesses. I mean, he is somebody who’s always out there trying to take control of the information space and they’re playing that against him.
One could argue that he’s out there so frequently, saying so many things, that it’s actually harming the ability to actually get the Iranians to make some kind of deal. They may well be ready for it, but every time he says something about them and against them, they feel are incumbent upon them because of the way that they think. I mean, they also think in a way, that they cannot let an insult take hold either. I mean, he hasn’t really got their mentality. He hasn’t understood it. They’re just as bloody-minded, and single-minded, and narcissistic, and nihilistic as kind of anyone could possibly be. They are a maligned force. It’s kind of one maligned force playing off against another and trying to always get the upper hand. They will never let him have the last word because I mean, they’re fighting . . . It’s also existential for them. It’s become existential for Trump, in some respects, that he will never understand, I think, but it’s absolutely existential for Iran. Just like for Ukraine, it’s existential. And now for Putin, it’s become existential for him, the war in Ukraine.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
I want to turn to Ukraine in a moment, but just to stick with Iran, if you would be willing to venture a prediction at this point, on Tuesday morning, May 5, given your experience advising Trump, or attempting to advise Trump, given your observation of him now, how do you think he will approach Iran going forward? Is he desperate for a deal, willing to escalate? What’s your guess?
FIONA HILL
He’s always willing to escalate, in terms of his rhetoric and everything else that he’s thinking about. I think that we’ve got ourselves into a vicious cycle here. As I’ve already mentioned, I just think this is going to keep on going for some time. It’s going to be really, I think, incumbent on others to really kind of corral this and to constrain this arena, be this a combination of China and other countries, or what’s left of US allies in the Gulf and elsewhere, just trying to narrow down the options of where this can go. That’s going to be extraordinarily hard, because right now it’s a standoff between Trump and the Iranians. Again, it’s having global implications. This is not just something that he can pursue on self-interest and neither can they, frankly, either. And so yes, they are desperate, but again, they’re desperate and they don’t want . . .
I mean, where do they go? I mean, they’ve got nowhere to go, the Iranian regime either. I mean, they’re not loved at home. I mean, everyone is hunkering down, but the prospect of having this war end and being left with a completely broken country is not a good one. I mean, they thrive now and they’re consolidating what’s left of themselves in this atmosphere of standoff with Trump, and they’re winning some points for that. In a way, I mean, I think it’s getting in the direction of where we do see Russia and Ukraine, where you can’t really afford the war to end. There’s certainly no kind of . . . Putin can’t, because what do you do with peace? And Iran is, again, a nihilistic power regime that can’t offer its people any future. Basically for them, they’re going to have to really have something very positive to come out of this conflict for them, and I just cannot see that. I cannot see something positive coming out of this. So it’s a question about whether everybody is left with limited choice.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
What is Putin concluding as he’s watching the war in Iran? Obviously, as many have pointed out, he’s gotten benefits in oil prices and weapon stocks are being diverted from Ukraine to Gulf allies, especially interceptors, which are very important to Ukraine. At the same time, I imagine the just sheer display of American military power leaves some impression. How’s he understanding the world and the effects of this war?
FIONA HILL
Well, it’s hard to say really, because of course we now hear that Putin is even more hunkered down or bunkered down than he was before, because the Ukrainians, like the Iranians, are dispelling his sense of security at home in Russia. I mean, what Iran has done in the Gulf has also had a very negative effect on Russia, just to be clear, because so much of Russian money, including the heads of the biggest companies, the sovereign wealth fund, et cetera, et cetera, had found the Gulf a safe haven. You had a lot of people who’d been pushed out of Europe by sanctions, or by various restrictions, or out of Russia previously because of the war, or because it was actually easier for them to do business offshore, which is kind of some of the things that Putin has actually encouraged. Where were most of them? They were in the Gulf and the Emirates.
All the flights going backwards and forwards from Russia to the Gulf States, tourists, middle-class tourists from Russia going there, as well as to places like Egypt and elsewhere. That safe haven has gone. There’s now also discussions that within Russia itself, many of the big businesses that have prospered because of the war, maybe benefited from the raise in oil prices, a feeling that this situation is starting to become untenable. There’s problems for the Russian economy, and now there’s kind of questions of, is there anywhere really safe for Russian money? We’re seeing also that Putin himself feels unsafe, physically. There’s lots of, again, reporting of this recently in the Financial Times.
I was just in London and hearing that from some of the reporters there who were kind of closer still to reporting in Russia. Some people are still going backwards and forwards and meeting regularly with top Russian business people. There’s starting to be a lot of grumbling, internally, now that Putin has basically taken this too far. Fifth year of war, what is the future of the country? Just like the Iranian regime, he’s not offering anything for the future. He’s only offering a past and one that’s looking increasingly shaky, even the kind of the claims that he’s making about Ukraine or Russia’s position in Europe.
I think the war in Iran has had all kinds of unsettling impacts. I wouldn’t say that Putin was a close friend of Ayatollah Khamenei, but there had been rumors that the Ayatollah’s son, his replacement has been having medical care in Moscow. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but you can be sure that the Russians would know the state of his health, in any case, and seeing so many people taken out in that leadership. Putin’s always been paranoid about that.
In 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi was taken out in Libya, that had a really negative effect on him, and he did start to think even more about his security. It was one of the reasons that he actually returned to the presidency, feeling he’d be more secure as president of Russia than he would be as being prime minister, or as a sort of a ex officio emeritus president, and prime minister hanging out somewhere in a dacha that might not be secure. A dacha, of course, meaning a palace somewhere on the Black Sea that we learned about from Alexei Navalny. The fact that he’s had so many people taken out like Navalny and others, he started to worry himself about his own physical security even more.
Again, very unsettling. The war in Ukraine has actually been a major blow to him over time, just the attrition, the loss of life, the negative impacts that this has had on Russia. It does look like he wouldn’t be willing to settle without getting all of Donbas. And though they’re still making some incremental gains here and there, the Russians are really suffering. The casualty rates are phenomenal. Last month, it was like 35,000 casualties of people injured and killed, couple of hundred, to 300, to 400, to 500 a day, depending on the battle. You can’t keep that up. You really cannot keep that up. We said it can’t keep that up forever. Putin’s expectations that Trump would hand him a victory. The more that the Ukrainians sour on the United States, which is becoming pretty evident now, the more that things change, the more that Trump becomes preoccupied with something else, actually, the less likely he is to hand Putin a victory. He’s no longer literally his Trump card.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
It’s also striking watching Russia react to Iran, but also Venezuela, or you have events in the last several days in Mali where Russian troops are supposed to be protecting the government from insurgents, and instead the defense minister ended up getting killed after those troops were overrun. Russia’s looking like a pretty bad security provider, or a pretty bad patron, “the world’s worst patron” as a piece by Alexander Gabuev and Sergey Vakulenko put it in our pages a little while ago. That must have some effect on Russia’s global power and Putin’s sense of its own possibilities.
FIONA HILL
Yeah. I think that is actually true. To be frank, Putin started to get that kind of reputation pretty early on in the war in Ukraine, this is now pretty late on, because the Ukrainians managed to hold him off. There was already kind of a question then about all of those militaries that have got training from Russian specialists, be it Wagner or others, but also using Russian equipment that you were able to see the weakness of all of this. Now, we know that Russia has innovated pretty effectively. It has also benefited, just like Ukraine has, from all of this real-time battlefield experiments with different kinds of equipment. Russia’s also moved towards mostly drone and automated warfare, but I mean, it depended heavily, first of all, on Iran for the cheap production of the Shahed drones and also then on components from China. So Russia is struggling, somewhat.
Even if it does get more revenue, as a result of higher oil prices, the Ukrainians are absolutely destroying much of its refining and other energy infrastructure as well, so it doesn’t necessarily have more money to buy more of these components. If you are another country that’s kind of watching that, you have to wonder about their training and their kind of capacity for battlefield acumen, because the Ukrainians have brought them to a standstill. You’re also not getting the weaponry that you were getting before, because the Russian arm sales have gone down by necessity, because they’re using them and burning them up. Just like the United States is burning up weaponry in the Gulf, Russia is burning it up on the battlefield in Ukraine. You also see this dependence on components from other places. You add that together and Russia was one of the top armaments producers for export in the world previously, and that has absolutely declined. Countries that did rely on Russia’s capacity, Russia’s whole posture, before, which included China and India and other countries, they’re actually also moving beyond.
Ukraine was a military in the mold of Russia, obviously, because it had broken away from the overall Soviet military. The Ukrainians know all the things that the Russians know and more. They’re demonstrating to everybody that you have to move beyond those sort of set pieces of Russian strategy and equipment. I mean, I do think this is a lesson to all of those who have relied on Russia. I think the problem is for countries like India and others, they can’t as yet afford to completely move away because China is that big uncertainty. For India and other countries that might have a tense relationship with China, they keep hoping that Russia will still be some kind of counterweight, but the whole war in Ukraine points towards the exact opposite, increasing reliance of Russia on China for components and political support.
Still the Ukrainians now say that they believe that China has the upper hand there, and that if China wanted to have the war end, I mean, the Chinese tell people, including my colleagues here at Brookings who have recently been in China and asked Chinese senior officials about the war in Ukraine and why they keep supporting Russia. The Chinese officials have said to them, “If we wanted Russia to win, it would’ve done.” The Ukrainians also feel that, well, China might hold some of the cards there in literally getting Russia at some point to move towards resolving this, one way or another.
The sticking point is still very much that territory of Donbas that Ukraine continues to hold, because it’s also heavily fortified. Why would the Ukrainians want to give that up to fall back to weaker positions, but that Putin needs to be able to scope out some kind of win, because even though he’s taken vast territories of Mariupol and all those areas around the Sea of Azov and that whole territory going down to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, he set his sights on Donbas. That was the crux of this conflict, certainly initially, and he still hasn’t secured all of it, which he said was his main goal.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
If Putin were to end the war without getting that territory, either through military progress, or through a negotiation, or kind of a gift from Trump, would he be at risk of losing power at home? Would that kind of be such a blow to his image, domestically, that it truly would be a threat to him?
FIONA HILL
It ups the ante, it could well be. Again, that was dynamics inside of Russia. I mean, if people are complaining, they’re not making it so evident inside, but you see how he had to respond to the woman blogger from Monaco, for example, who got millions of views and hits on her rather anodyne complaint, but still voicing the dissatisfaction of people around Putin who thought this war was going to end these rumors that are percolating around in Europe, in various journalistic and business circles, that many of the top business people are greatly dissatisfied, again, because of their lack of a safe place in the Gulf and starting to think, “Well, maybe things need to change in Russia.” The sanctions are sort of having an impact now because they didn’t have an impact while Russia could redirect trade flows and take advantage of everything happening elsewhere.
Ironically, perhaps Trump’s action in the Gulf against Iran could be the biggest blow because it is a system changing event. It could end up with neither . . . It’s a bit like World War I, World War II, right? Some of the so called victors were not the victors at all. The United Kingdom was completely ground down by a succession of World War I and World War II. At the end of World War I, all the great empires have gone. It could well be that the United States and Russia are grievously wounded by this series of events. I’m not completely optimistic on China’s behalf either that they get to take advantage of all this because the biggest negative impacts of what’s happening are in Asia. The insecurity and instability of the countries immediately around China, even if China manages to weather the storm somewhat, what about all of its neighbors and the impact that that might have on China’s own economy, which is interdependent with all of these. I mean, unless the Chinese internal market is sufficient to compensate for this, there’s going to be a lot of very negative knock-on effects.
A colleague at Brookings, Eswar Prasad, has written this book called The Doom Loop, which has just come out.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
We ran an essay from him.
FIONA HILL
Yes. Yes. I had a feeling that you had. Of course that shows that China cannot pick up the global economic slack. Although there’s some hints of optimism there of people rethinking, and refocusing, and restructuring, which I think is inevitable, he also does believe that we’ve moved into a completely different world for the global economy, and you cannot think that we’re just galloping from one hegemon to the next. I sort of think that, look, we’re going to have maybe ultimately somewhere down the line, it could be decades that people might think, "Well, this was a cathartic experience." Sort of a world cataclysmic set of events that just had to happen, like a massive brushfire or conflagration that kind of clears the way for something new. It’s really hard to say at this particular stage what that new thing will be, or that new set of things, but it’s definitely we’re in for a refresh.
Here in the United States, I mean, you see the actual individual states reassessing the situation, as well as the federal government gets dismantled and wondering what they will have to substitute or how groups of states might work together. When I was recently in London and before that, there were various visits by delegations of business people and the American and British Chambers of Commerce were talking about how US individual states are trying to set up their own memos of understanding with European British counterparts, because they feel that there’s tension at the top, that Trump speaking for the United States is actually doing a lot of damage to their own interests, which don’t change. This isn’t politics for them, it’s kind of real life, real people’s jobs. The future of big states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, not to just mention Texas and California.
In a way, I think the United States themselves, the individual states, feel as much colonies, particularly if they’re not red states, as European allies and other countries that have previously been allies of the United States feel at this moment in this Trumpian world, that all of them are dispensable and that they’re going to have to start thinking themselves about how they position themselves.
Iran, kind of dragging the United States down. The more it’s doing that will, I think, accelerate a lot of these already trends that we see.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Do you have any speculation about what might come after that rupture, to use a word that’s been used often in recent months?
FIONA HILL
Yes. Thank you, Mark Carney. Look, I mean, I think Mark Carney is already showing the way to that. People are very skeptical about what Canada can really pull off, but setting up these various banks, essentially bundling together funds to try to diversify Canadian economy away from the United States, probably very smart move, but also funds for building up Canada’s own defense, long overdue, frankly. Those are the kinds of things I think we’re going to start seeing in other places as well. I mean, I hate to say it, but the UK doesn’t seem capable, at this particular point, because of all the political churn that’s going on, of moving forward in a way. I mean, the churn previously in Canada with weak governments was an obstacle. Mark Carney’s got a mandate now from the electorate to move forward.
So many other countries, Chancellor Merz as well. I mean, this is probably another spur, particularly just discussions about pulling troops out of Germany, which frankly Trump intended to do all the way along. I mean, this is hardly a surprise. It’s a question about where else he will take troops out of. It does hurt US interests, because one way to think about Europe and the UK is like a giant aircraft carrier, which positions the United States much closer to places it might be concerned about. That’s a decision that Trump has made and it will have consequences. The consequences will be, again, more regional groupings of other countries. You’ve already got the joint expeditionary force, the JEF, which is a grouping of the UK, the Nordic, Baltic, and other countries that Canada is talking about joining, that would position them to really think about security in the high north, the North Atlantic, the North Sea, for example.
That could also be used as a platform for more joint defense funding, and procurement, and development. You’ve got other regional groupings that are taking shape. I think if Trump goes ahead with what is threatening for the G20 coming up this year, to totally disinvite South Africa, you’ll get other countries starting to think, “Well, what’s the point of having a G20?” Why not reformulate that? The G7 already looks somewhat dead in the water and obsolete. How do we create other regional groupings? It wouldn’t necessarily just be the BRICS, or the Shanghai Corporation Organization, but how do we get together for economic and trade purposes? Everybody wants alternatives. I think we’ll just start to see that happening, including in the United States.
States will have to group together, you’re seeing it on vaccine mandates, you’re seeing that on higher education, you’re seeing it on all kinds of different fronts right now, where the departure of the federal government from traditional areas of funding will mean that you’re having to have new coalitions, maybe public, private, philanthropy involved in this private sector companies that have strong stakes in their own states, be it Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, California, who start to work more closely with governors and mayors, et cetera.
I just think all of these things are possible. We’ll see a pretty fluid space, I think, in the economic security and other dimensions for some period of time before something else coalesces. You’re sort of seeing the building blocks of something taking shape here.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
How do you rate European action on Ukraine as the US has reduced its support?
FIONA HILL
Well, look, countries like the UK have been committed right from the beginning, and it’s never really got much attention here. For all of the problems that the UK is facing, politically and domestically, it’s done a crack, cracking job. I mean, the UK would say a bang up job, in support for Ukraine, and it’s learned an enormous amount. I mean, if the UK military was given a bit more kind of free rein and some more resources, I mean, that’s been a big thing. I took part in the Strategic Defense Review with the UK last year, and there’s just a lot of capacity there for innovation. The UK military has absorbed all of those lessons from Ukraine in ways that, frankly, the US military has not, despite talking about it, and saying that it has, because Trump’s creating a bottleneck for it, saying, “We’ve nothing to learn from the Ukraine. We’re absolutely amazing ourselves.” Wrong. Ukraine is at the cutting hedge of future war fighting until the next war, of course. I mean, that’s kind of basically what everyone is looking at right now.
The Europeans are leaning into that. They’re learning those lessons and they’re thinking about how they engage with Ukraine. Ukraine is going to be the most competent military in Europe. It’s going to be up there with Turkey and Finland, neither of which have been tested in the way that Ukrainians have. The Ukrainians are going to have an awful lot to offer for Europe and elsewhere. Ukraine is going to be an asset over the longer term, which they were hoping to be, for European security. I do think that that’s now the hope in most people’s minds. The more that Trump distances the United States from this, the more that that will become apparent. I think we’re already in that kind of post-American world, in terms of a mindset.
Now, it is of course the case that there is still a great deal of dependency on the United States. Some people will argue, well, it’s high time that Europe starts to set up . . . There’s limits to what they can do, but I think you’ve got a mindset now, stop telling us what we can’t do and let’s look at what we can do. That is really starting to shift. That’s been shifting more in the last several months, especially since February, given this kind of massive attack on Iran and the consequences. So again, we are always saying in the United States, “No, you can’t do this, you can’t do that.” People start saying, “Okay, fine, but what can we do? Let’s kind of take a look and let’s be more creative.” That’s where the Ukrainians are now.
Yes, they’re all beaten up, but they’re not beaten. They’re battered, but they’re not battered completely down. They’ve actually proven that they can keep on going, despite all of the odds. There’s something in that, despite all the exhaustion and the desire to have this war over with. Again, I think they are having an impact on Europeans. Even if Trump is really angry with people like Santos in Spain and others, if you listen to what they have to say about the way that they’re thinking of Europe, they’re thinking of a very different place from where it was before.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
You suggested earlier that Trump had prolonged the war in Ukraine, rather than ending it in a 24 hours as he said he would. In what ways has that been true? Is that about the cutoff in intel, support, and air defenses at various points, even as Putin has reason to think that he can keep going, or are there other dynamics here? And if I can ask you to imagine yourself back in your old job on the National Security Council in this term, what would you be advising Trump about, about how to actually end the war?
FIONA HILL
Yeah. I mean, I would’ve advised Trump to do none of the things that he’s done, honestly, apart from maintain that support. I do think there were people around him, including General Kellogg and others, who were trying to keep him on that path for a period. I mean, he should have had complete unity with his allies and they should have been figuring out how to bring this to a conclusion, by making it apparent to Putin that he couldn’t secure the territory that he wanted to without these incredible losses. Now, Putin’s still been having these losses, but he always thinks that he can shift things on the political playing field and that Trump is going to basically browbeat the Ukrainians into handing a victory over to him. That’s definitely kept things going.
Certainly they took the edge off the Ukrainian offensive. It could have been more decisive. Maybe they even drove the Ukrainians into doing things that were unwise. I think it was very unwise Ukrainians to go into Kursk. Of course, that was on Biden’s watch, but that was at a period where Trump was actually pushing, from Mar-a-Lago, to have a total cutoff of assistance to Ukraine as well. Even when he wasn’t in power, he was kind of talking down, continuing to give Ukraine aid. He was not wrong, of course, that Europe should have been doing more. That kind of pushed to get Europe to do more, should always have been imperative, always pushing Europeans to do more to take charge of this, but not undermining their ability to negotiate, because what’s happened is the negotiations have been all about Trump.
This is all just about Trump negotiating with himself. Even more so even with Putin. It’s all been about Trump and Putin and the Trump and Putin relationship, or the relationship between their entourages and the business people around them who can enrich themselves on various deals. It’s had little to do with Ukraine and very little to do even with Russia in the United States. That’s kind of really what’s been the problem, he’s made it all about him at all times. The humiliation of Zelensky, I mean, completely and utterly uncalled-for.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Is your expectation that the war will continue until there’s some exogenous shock that fundamentally changes dynamics?
FIONA HILL
Yeah. Look, maybe this is one of those shocks. I mean, initially it looked like it was a shock in favor of Russia, but it might not be.
A very wise analyst in the UK described it to me last week as deadlock rather than stalemate. That got me thinking for a while because I kept thinking, what’s the difference between stalemate and a deadlock? One, of course, comes from a little more chess and the other is this case of stalemate, and obviously neither side can move. I think with deadlock, as he was describing it, one side could decide to break out of that, and to make a sudden move. It would have to be a concession from one to the other, but it’s that kind of refusal to move, rather than the fact that they can’t move, that is kind of part of the problem there. It could be that Russia or Putin gets forced to make a move to say, “Okay. That’s it.” But again, the consequences could be pretty dire as we’ve just discussed.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Given your understanding of Putin, and how he operates, what might it be that would prod him to make that move?
FIONA HILL
I think a concerted pressure from, not the United States, but China and maybe the Gulf states just saying, “Look, enough.” Again, I can’t quite think about what the pathway would be to this at the moment. Again, the Ukrainians are pretty convinced that China holds the key, but it may be that more parties hold the key here. Also, it could be internally as Putin kind of feels that he’s got limited room for maneuver and he’s starting to get pressure. I mean, particularly if he starts to feel fearful for his own safety and security, but then again, it makes it really difficult to imagine peace. Same for the Iranians, the regime. In peace, what do you have?
We see now with Trump that he’s moved from the domestic to the foreign policy front and he has to be constantly in the center of action and doing things all the time. For Putin, he has become a wartime president. He passed being the peacetime president a long time ago. I think there’s very little that he can go back to at this point. He can’t offer something different. He can’t offer a future. The question is, will somebody else offer one?
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
The other dimension of the US-Russia relationship that seems particularly worrying, though it doesn’t dominate headlines in the same way, is on the nuclear front. A couple of months ago, the last remaining arms control agreement vanished, New START. We see various attempts to modernize or innovate on nuclear arsenals on both sides. How worried are you about that piece of this?
FIONA HILL
I’m more worried about the proliferation issues, at this particular point, which I think gets us into a pretty dangerous territory, overall, because all of the lessons from both the war in Ukraine and war against Iran are nuclear lessons, which is one country’s getting attacked for being close to getting a nuclear weapon, probably wouldn’t have been attacked if it had one. Another country was attacked because it had given up having some fashion of a nuclear arsenal, legacy arsenal that it got from the collapse of the Soviet Union. If you’re then sitting in Pyongyang and everywhere else that might be worried about your neighbors, you start to think, “Well, let’s kind of accelerate where we are now.” Others in the Gulf are thinking, “Why then don’t we have a nuclear weapon? Why were we just kind of sitting back?”
Others who were under the United States nuclear umbrella, what’s that worth? Because you’ve got Trump threatening NATO members with all kinds of things, talking about NATO as a paper tiger, his own led alliance that had the nuclear umbrella as the paramount securities, basically saying all of this is for naught. It’s creating all kinds of debates in Europe about what about the future of the UK Trident submarine deterrent? Can that be relied on if it’s intertwined with US technical expertise and if it’s a sort of almost, in a way, joint enterprise. What about the French? Their decision, of course, was after Suez and elsewhere to kind of go ahead with their own deterrent because they never really did trust the United States. They seemed to have been born out in terms of that decision. So should other European countries be talking about their own nuclear weapon or creating a European nuclear weapon on the basis of either the French force or some combination of France and the UK. Then of course you’ve got Turkey. Why does Pakistan have a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia? The Pakistan, India, standoff is always kind of incredibly dangerous.
I worry about all of this. I worry about that now, the United States has unleashed proliferation, because of these injudicious, unwise steps that Trump has made. There’s a tragedy in that, because Trump actually did want to have strategic stability talks, have a new arms control deals. He personally did, even if people around him might not necessarily have been quite as keen with Russia, particularly after the end of the ABM, and the INF and other treaties, New START. He wanted to have his own super Trump arms regulation treaty. You and I’ve talked about that before. With China, with North Korea, with Iran, I mean, all of this has been about, for him, the nuclear weapons programs, less about really regime change and everything. It’s not panned out. There’s the tragedy in all of that because he didn’t really understand all the dynamics.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
As you look at the transatlantic relationship, do you see a real risk that NATO could come apart in the next few years?
FIONA HILL
I see a different configuration of NATO, because I think that all of the other countries really benefit from it. We’ve got Sweden and Finland in there now, Canada is stepping up and I think you could see still a North Atlantic treaty organization with . . . Canada is in the North Atlantic, obviously. There’s an Arctic power as well with a lot more dedication and commitment from the Europeans, as there should have been all the way along. I mean, the point about all of this is there should have been a renegotiation and a more of a Europeanization of NATO a long time ago. That discrepancy between EU security and NATO should have been worked out probably 15 plus years ago. If we go back to 2009, the Lisbon Treaty, when the UK was still part of the EU, and there was that sort of discussion about the EU becoming more of a geopolitical actor and having more of a security and defense perspective, then that would have been a really good time to open up that kind of debate about how Europe should have done more for its own security.
What would the future be then of a NATO with the EU having a somewhat different configuration, but supposed to be taking on more security? How would European Union members be contributing more, would there be more money coming from the EU, kind of paying into NATO as well? That was long overdue, but of course we had the financial crisis immediately afterwards. 2009, 2010 was not a good time to talk about that. I think Obama did try that again, but of course the EU wasn’t present at the Wales Summit for NATO in 2014. That was when there was the agreement of 2% of GDP, but that could also have opened up a set of discussions with Europe and the European Union, is what I’m meaning there when I say Europe’s the European Union, about how they would contribute more to the security. Of course, there was Crimea and the beginning of all of that upheaval, but the Germans were reluctant to do this. Frankly, there was a lot of blocks on the European side, so that is on them. We are long overdue, but I think that now Germany has fully appreciated all of this.
I was asked a question, I was at a parliamentary hearing in the UK last week, about whether the kind of US support for NATO had really infantilized Europe. I think that’s a fair question. I think in some respects, yes. Or in the case of creating more of a sense of dependency and people not being able to think beyond that dependency, which is where we still are now in many respects. That also means that the US can’t think beyond that dependency either. I mean, frankly, the way that people in the US, on both sides of the aisle, Democrat and Republican, have talked about Europe as if it’s an unwashed mass of idiots, I mean, I heard that in the Biden administration just as much as in the Trump administration, is a problem in itself because the United States has infantilized Europe and seeing these kind of dependencies and not seeing . . .
What are they even talking about when they talk about Europe? I think they think about Eurocrats or Nigel Farage cartoon character depictions of Europeans. They’re sort not thinking about the Fins, or the Norwegians, or the Swedes or others, certainly not . . . Like the Ukrainians haven’t fully understood who Ukrainians are and what they’re about either. I think that that is problematic. So it’s a kind of a two-way street here. It’s a two-way problem in the way that people conceptualize Europe and Europeans because I mean, again, there’s going to be a lot of sorting out to do in that European frame, but people are starting to talk about that now. There needs to be national conversations.
One of the reasons I was over in the UK was because the Strategic Defense Review had prefigured a national conversation about defense, looking, first of all, at the threat environment, which of course has got worse in the past year. And then what society as a whole would have to do about it, not just the Ministry of Defense. That really needs to take place, but we need one in the United States too.
I think, at the end of all of this, there’s going to have to be a reckoning here in the US about the state of play, the fetishization of the presidency. I mean, that was not prefigured 250 years ago. In fact, it was forewarned and foretold as a real risk. Everything was done to try to head that off and here we are. And also, about how the states and broader society have a say through Congress on all of these particular issues. I think we’re going to have to have the same debate about what the United States wants to be now that it is grown up, 250 years on. Europe needs to think about a world that is not dominated, as it has been for the last 80 years by the United States. I mean, I keep thinking how ironic it is about Mark Rutte, totally cringe-worthy talking about Trump as daddy.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
FIONA HILL
Yeah. I don’t know about you, but I hung my head in embarrassment about that, but he had a point because Europe has thought about the United States as daddy. When your parents get to be 80, sometimes you have to make decisions on their behalf, or decisions beyond them, right? 80 years is more than enough time to be moving away from this relationship. Europe has been on notice for a long time that this moment was going to come. It has now come.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Can you imagine that Europeanized NATO functioning without the United States if the United States withdrew?
FIONA HILL
I wonder whether the United States would want it to function without them, because I mean, again, it’s going to be a big blow to United States leadership, this moniker of the leader of the free world, forget that. In fact, nobody’s using that now, honestly, because they see Trump as something completely different, certainly not the leader of any free world. Of course, as he said, nothing is free anyway. It’s all taxes, and tariffs, and sanctions and all kinds of things anyway.
Putting that joking aside, the more that Europeans invest in their own defense structures, the less that they will be looking to the United States. Frankly, the United States is saying, "Look, we don’t have the capacity." It is risky for US trade. You see that US businesses, and again, US states, want to keep those very important relationships that they have with their trading partners and with their customers. I mean, I think that there will be a push from within the United States. The United States also does rely, whether Trump realizes or not, on a lot of data and equipment, and a lot of that will be lost in Europe.
When the interviews were going on for the Strategic Defense Review, we had many sessions here in the US, because of course, the UK did not want to have a rupture with the US, at that particular point. It still saw the United States as its number one defense partner, even if the writing was already on the wall that the United States was going to do less and less overtime, irrespective of who became president in 2024. One very senior US Pentagon official described the UK as an aircraft carrier for the United States, a bit like the correlate of Hawaii, which of course nobody really thinks of Hawaii and the United Kingdom as very similar, but in terms of strategic location, configuration as a set of islands and kind of ability for the United States to launch itself off. Which is why, of course, Trump has been so angry initially with the United Kingdom for not immediately allowing the bases, because I mean, the United Kingdom has laws against preemptive war.
It has to basically facilitate something on the base of a defensive operations, which of course, eventually Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to, and when the United States has been using the base. In fact, the United States has been using many of its bases across Europe. I mean, that again is a lesson that the United States won’t necessarily have access to this if it kind of goes down this particular path. Look, many people in Congress know this, many leading US military strategists do. It’s just kind of a question about how much damage will have been done to these relationships. So again, I think it’s not just a question of, can Europe do without the United States? I think this is a two-way street here for the US will be certain things that the US will regret deeply if it really is fully ruptured. I don’t think that’s in anyone’s interest.
I’m advising the UK and other Europeans to do their best they can to diversify away from the United States. It’s more about getting rid of those things at real vulnerabilities, getting back some sovereign capacity, which frankly they should never have given up, not destroying or moving away from the things that are mutually beneficial and make sense.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
What seems especially challenging for European governments at this point is that you have the US on one side questioning support, throwing up economic challenges, but then the other great superpower is China, which, economically at least, is similarly threatening or more threatening. How do you understand the range of European views and approaches on China right now? Do you see a real change there?
FIONA HILL
Well, I think in terms of the way that we see some courting of China in the way that they did years ago, but going back to, it’s merely just trying to figure out the limits of possibility. What is possible with China, without getting the blowback and the vulnerabilities. There’s no desire to go from one hegemon to another. Even though Trump is denouncing some of these moves, it’s just the Europeans trying to find some kind of rebalancing because I mean, the Germans, the Brits and others have been, and Canada prior to this, were burnt by overexposure in China as well, because we know that China has been reverse engineering everything from the US and from all of its European counterparts to do everything itself. That was a Chinese goal and it’s pretty much achieved this. People see the entry of China into the WTO have been just as damaging for industry and for workers in Europe, as it was for the United States.
Germany’s export orientation towards China has kind of proven to be not a total dead end now, but certainly not what they anticipated, it certainly wasn’t something that was going on forever. They have to deal with China, while China’s still the leader in green technology. I mean, that’s something that the United States has completely given up on, or not completely, but certainly under Trump has stepped back on, which is pretty foolish, honestly, because everything that’s happening in the Persian Gulf suggests that all the countries are going to actually have to double down, whether they like it or not, on moving away from hydrocarbon dependency, even if it’s not easy and it’s going to be extraordinarily expensive. I mean the UK, it’s been so expensive, quite damaging to the economy, but there’s a sort of a feeling now that they can’t really turn back. Maybe they need to have more emphasis on nuclear, but then again, you’ve got all the problems of where you’re getting the uranium for enrichment, et cetera, and then all of the disposal.
But again, companies like Rolls-Royce are heavily invested in creating these small modular reactors. That’s a UK company, even though it’s obviously doing that in conjunction with the United States, for example. There’s an understanding that you’re going to have to look at local grids and kind of think outside the box, but you can’t go on as you are. Although American LNG and everything else is an important factor in this kind of interim, particularly given what’s happening in the Gulf, there’s just a real reluctance now to have any more dependencies and vulnerabilities. China, the same. You don’t want to be reliant on everything made in China and having China dominate critical minerals. There’s a lot of discussion now about recycling, trying to reclaim any of those components. Can you look for other sources of lithium, and salts, and other catalysts for electrical currents that could be organic and not based on critical . . .
There’s all kinds of research going on, in the UK and elsewhere, it’s just a question of getting it to scale because people are worried about exactly that same problem down the line. It’s not a question of running from the US to China. Nobody wants to be in a block world now, stuck between China and the United States. That idea of a tripartite world carved up among China, the United States, and maybe Russia, that’s just not what anybody is envisaging.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Do you think Trump finds appeal in that idea?
FIONA HILL
I think he might have at one point, but I think he’s gone beyond that now. He’s just thinking of himself as world dominating. The world’s historic individual. There was a piece in The Atlantic, “The YOLO Presidency.” I’d already listened to a podcast about this. You’ve had things about this in the pages of Foreign Affairs. For my 60th birthday, I walked along Hadrian’s Wall and falling into that kind of cliche of the person who thinks about the Roman Empire all the time. I am that person. It’s not all just men who do. I think about it once or twice a day, I do, because I grew up right next to a Roman fort when I was a kid, so it was inevitable. I was thinking about the bloody Romans. They were there. They were omnipresent. Every school trip was to some Roman fort or the wall.
I kept thinking about that, that Putin may think that he’s a world historic individual, Xi definitely thinks of this, but boy, is Trump trumping all of them because he really has gone into that phase. The rebuilding of America, it’s just like the building of the wall. I mean, Hadrian didn’t build the wall until he was part into his reign. It was a long time after the Romans had made it to Britain, because he was trying to demarcate out his empire. All of these emperors go on these building phases to say they are someone, and they want it all done in their lifetime so they can take advantage of it. Hadrian went around the entire Roman Empire after getting a bit depressed about the loss of his lover. It was just to kind of make himself feel that he was real again. I think Trump is being relevant to himself. He just can’t imagine a world without him, and he wants to just indulge himself in this building frenzy.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
What about Xi Jinping? Is he navigating this geopolitical moment well?
FIONA HILL
Well, we’ll see, won’t we? We’ll see whether he decides to do something or not do something on Taiwan. If I were him, I’d wait and see how this all plays out, but I don’t know whether he feels that time is on his side or not. Putin and Xi are of the same age, I mean, they’re in their 70s, they’ll hit 74 roughly this year. I mean, they’re a bit younger than Trump who hits 80, for God’s sake, in June, but they’ve got to be wondering as well. Both Xi and Putin have been engaging in purges of personnel, consolidation, creating verticals of power. They obviously don’t feel secure. We’ve got that hot mic incident with them, both of them talking about organ replacements and can they live forever. Putin obviously uses a lot of Botox. These guys have been trying to turn the clock back.
I mean, you’ve got to make fun of it because otherwise, what do you do with this dark moment in history? Yeah. We are, indeed, cursed by this interesting time with three major world figures and the poor Pope trying to make sense of it all in the middle of it.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
One more leader I want to get your thoughts on is Viktor Orban, who was of course seen as the kind of at least symbolizing, not as world historically important as the other three, but symbolize this kind of a liberal tide. Do you see his defeat, in a recent election, as a major turning point? And if so, what are the lessons in that?
FIONA HILL
Well, it’s a cautionary tale. I mean, we could also pick out Erdogan in Turkey and others. It’s a cautionary tale for hubris and for robbing the country. I mean, ultimately, it wasn’t necessarily because of his rollback of democracy, I think that’s kind of part of the issue. It’s really running the economy into the ground and taking too much of the pie. There is a cautionary tale there. The other point is that it really took all of the opposition to swallow their pride and to get behind. I mean, the wonderfully named Peter Magyar, because of course Magyar means Hungarian, so it was a Hungarian for Hungary. Others decided, well, he was the most likely person to be able to defeat Orban, because he knew him best, and he was still a conservative candidate who stood for some of the same things that Orban did, which is obviously more resonant with the broader population of Hungary. Everybody else in the opposition got behind him because the main thing was trying to restore some semblance of democratic choice. It’s the anti-corruption and the running the economy into the ground.
Look, that’s exactly what we have in the United States. The corruption is off the charts. I mean, it’s just shocking. On the outside, when you go to Europe and the UK, people are stunned by what’s happening here. I find it hard to imagine that Americans really can stomach this kind of thing, because Trump is so evidently all about just enriching himself and those around him. He is not for the average American. I mean, it took a lot of time in Hungary, but people are really hurting here. The inequality is off the charts, in a way that it wasn’t in Hungary. I mean, Hungary isn’t home to trillionaires and billionaires on this scale. I mean, Russia has that kind of level of inequality, but Russia has always had that kind of apex predator culture with the vertical of power. The United States was supposed to be more of a . . . I mean, maybe if not fully egalitarian society, but one in which anybody could have a chance. Well, almost nobody has a chance now unless you know Trump and you’re related to him.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Do you see that corruption having a distorting effect when it comes to American foreign policy and power?
FIONA HILL
It’s an incredibly corrosive effect. I mean, all of foreign policy is just about pandering to Trump and to the people who make money around him. I mean, a lot of the foreign policy moves that we see are being driven by people’s profit motive. I’m sorry, that’s just exactly how it is. It’s seen exactly like that. Bringing the man gold bars and kind of getting his family members sinecures. I mean, this makes anything that happened under the Biden administration, and all the discussions about Hunter Biden, pale into insignificance in comparison. Look, all of those things are bad. All of the kind of corruption that we’ve had over multiple presidencies that has been revealed by people taking advantage of their positions close to power. I mean, usually we try to actually stop that, but here, we’re just feeding it over and over again.
Also, I mean, the media distortion, I mean, people are enthralled to Trump. They can’t stop talking about him and thinking about him. We need to stop this. I was listening to the Tucker Carlson interview in the New York Times and just the way that he was describing this. He’s as guilty as everybody else is, in fact more guilty than most, about feeding this beast. There’s going to have to be a lot of people sitting with themselves in a darkened room and thinking about their responsibility for this.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Let me just return to close to this idea of Trump as a world historical figure. I mean, he imagines himself that way, you seem to think that that’s true as well.
FIONA HILL
If you and I are still around in a few decades from now, we could write a nice history book about it.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Great. Well, what do you think that inflection point is likely to be, if that is in fact the case?
FIONA HILL
Well, I think it’s already happened. I mean, just the way that he came back and the decisions that he’s made, particularly the decision to go to war against Iran. I mean, it’s like Napoleon going to Moscow in the middle of winter. It’s Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Napoleon, remember, ends up in Elba, maybe dying of Arsenic, maybe dying of stomach cancer. Will we ever really know? Alexander the Great getting all the way to India and having one banquet too many. None of these people ended particularly well. Again, apart from, as I said before, Genghis Khan, who seemed to go on for a very long time and have lots of sons who squandered the empire. Maybe that’s the Trumpian result. Eventually, the sons of Genghis Khan all went off and did their own thing, and eventually it kind of broke down into multiple little hoards and each one less golden than the last.
If we think about Ivan the Terrible and the impact that he had. Elizabeth I, another world’s historic figure, also far too much makeup, eventually gets arsenic poisoning and all her teeth fall out. There’s all kinds of ways in which one can make a horrible history out of this. There was a great BBC series of horrible histories, usually featuring these kind of world historic figures. There’s usually something horrible that kind of comes with all of the massive change. Even if, again, as I said, decades from now, we might find some of it was cathartic and important in terms of clearing the way for something else, there’s also been a lot of damage and destruction.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
That’s a rich set of analogies to close on. Fiona, thank you so much once again for doing this. Happy belated 60th birthday.
FIONA HILL
Well, thanks but it was a while back now. Last year.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Okay. Okay. I thought it was last week when you were walking.
FIONA HILL
Already into my 61st year. It was a great thing to do. I highly recommend to everybody go and walk Hadrian’s Wall or do a nice long walk for your birthday. It clears the mind.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
I suspect that one headline coming out of this will be about how often you think about the Roman Empire.
FIONA HILL
Yeah. Yeah. I know. I am that sad person who thinks about it frequently.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Well, thanks so much, Fiona. We’ll look forward to doing this again before too long.
FIONA HILL
Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me.
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