- 19 hours ago
World of Trouble: Putin is manipulating Trump and doesn’t want peace, ex-US aide warnsThe Independent
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00:00:00Are we at the end of the Western era?
00:00:03Definitely the end of this particular version of it.
00:00:07I mean, Putin has lost, he's failed.
00:00:09He failed to get Ukraine in the way that, you know, he intended to,
00:00:12and he's created just an incredible amount of devastation.
00:00:15Putin said, well, Donald, you know, because Trump was saying
00:00:18they'd named all these things after him,
00:00:19he said, well, maybe they should just name the country after you.
00:00:22And obviously, I mean, I almost like died laughing.
00:00:24Welcome to the World of Trouble.
00:00:30And I'm not going to lie, I've been really excited about this next interview victim
00:00:37that we have, who is Fiona Hill, a British-American academic, diplomat,
00:00:44former presidential advisor, chancellor of Durham University
00:00:49and star of the Brookings Institute in the United States.
00:00:55She's joining me from her offices in Washington, D.C.
00:00:59Fiona, that wasn't just flattery.
00:01:02There was a bit.
00:01:03But the fact of the matter is that over the last three and a half, four years,
00:01:08I've spent a great deal of time in Ukraine.
00:01:12And whilst I maintain my journalistic integrity and balance,
00:01:16I hope there is no question of who is in the right and who is in the wrong, in my view.
00:01:24But that does seem to be a question that's been reintroduced to the debate in the West
00:01:31with the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
00:01:35Can you explain to me this incredible vault fast that he made in terms of
00:01:40withdrawing support for Ukraine that had been full square delivered by the Biden administration?
00:01:47This has got to do with Donald Trump's worldview, Sam, as you well know.
00:01:51I'm sure, you know, has been discussed, you know, many times on this programme.
00:01:55He kind of thinks the same as the rest of these guys.
00:01:58He is, you know, very much the strong man in his mind.
00:02:01You know, we've got loads of books out about this being the age of strong men.
00:02:04And he hates and abhors weakness and he just perceives that Ukraine is weak because it's not a great power.
00:02:10And again, you know, what is a great power?
00:02:12I mean, it's a very 19th century view, but it's one, you know,
00:02:16in Donald Trump's mind that has a really strong military and has the ability to push everybody else around,
00:02:23has the ability to set its own agenda and actually has a sphere of influence, you know,
00:02:28and related to all of the rather, you know, shocking ways that he's talked about Ukraine.
00:02:32He's also talked with equal intensity about why is Canada not part of the United States?
00:02:37Why is it not the 51st state?
00:02:39Why shouldn't Greenland be part of Denmark, which is a country nobody's ever heard of kind of thing,
00:02:44far, far away.
00:02:45How come Denmark has Greenland?
00:02:47You know, completely ignorant and willfully so of the history of, you know, all of these different places.
00:02:54He just sees the map and thinks that that should belong to him.
00:02:56And he has the same view, frankly, of Ukraine.
00:02:58It was once part of the Russian Empire.
00:03:00It was part of the Soviet Union.
00:03:02Why should it not still be?
00:03:04The big question, I think, beyond all of this about Ukraine, I mean, it's fairly straightforward about how Trump thinks about it.
00:03:09He just can't stop himself from, you know, expressing all of this.
00:03:12It's kind of a stream of consciousness, verbalized all the time.
00:03:16Every thought bullet and, you know, kind of bubble that one would keep to oneself normally, you know,
00:03:21he puts out there.
00:03:21That's his blunt, you know, kind of frank way of approaching things.
00:03:24Is that he really kind of think that all of Europe, UK included, should also be in Russia's sphere of influence?
00:03:29Because he certainly thinks that China has the right to the sphere of influence as another big, great power.
00:03:34And for Russia, he hasn't basically resized Russia in his thinking.
00:03:39That Russia is still the superpower of the Cold War, the major adversary of the United States.
00:03:44It certainly still is, obviously, on the nuclear arsenal front.
00:03:46But it's been a long time since Russia was still, was a colossus astride, you know, the whole planet, you know, let alone part of Europe.
00:03:54And, I mean, I do kind of wonder, you know, when Pusk comes to Shorvisi thinking that Europe is part of Russia's sphere as well.
00:04:00And I think that's up for the UK and for European countries to, you know, reassert themselves in that space.
00:04:06Can you explain this sort of from perspective of psychology?
00:04:10I mean, you've dealt with the previous Trump administration.
00:04:13You've been on the inside track.
00:04:15And, you know, you've been in the room, you know, with Putin and Trump and others, people at these seminal moments in history.
00:04:24From the outside looking in, it kind of looks like a man crush.
00:04:28I mean, what is going on there?
00:04:29Has Putin got compromise on Trump?
00:04:32Is Putin a Russian agent, consciously or unconsciously?
00:04:37It is a man crush.
00:04:38It's because Putin's the badass, you know, in that sort of sense.
00:04:41He's what Trump would like to be.
00:04:44You know, Trump looks at people who are, you know, frankly, in charge of everything, who have the kind of basically the bling.
00:04:51You know, they're emblazoned in gold.
00:04:53They're in gold, bold relief at all times.
00:04:55And that's what he wants to be.
00:04:57And he believes that he is elevated in everybody's minds by their association, by being in their company.
00:05:04And that's what Putin's got on him.
00:05:06Putin's got his number.
00:05:07I mean, basically, Putin realizes it's a man with a very fragile ego and that it's somebody that can be manipulated in that way.
00:05:13He doesn't need compromising information.
00:05:15We've all got compromising information on Donald Trump.
00:05:18Again, he's an open book.
00:05:20But, you know, what this is, is really about Trump himself wanting to be recognized by absolutely everybody who matters.
00:05:27And that's a very small group of people on the one hand.
00:05:29But then everybody else on the other as being, you know, king of the world.
00:05:33And that's what he's talking about all the time.
00:05:35And he only gets that.
00:05:36He has the approval of people like President Xi of China, you know, President Putin of Russia, you know, the royal families of here, there and everywhere.
00:05:45That's kind of, you know, basically for Trump, what really matters.
00:05:49That's the coin of the realm for him.
00:05:52And is that something that Putin consciously exploits?
00:05:57Of course.
00:05:57Putin always does things consciously.
00:06:01You know, Putin himself is also vulnerable and, you know, has the same, you know, kind of fears that Trump does.
00:06:06Frankly, of being, you know, caught out, of being weakened, about, you know, being humiliated.
00:06:11But Putin is also very much steeped in the history of his own country, just like President Xi is.
00:06:16I mean, he knows his history.
00:06:17He thinks of himself as somebody in a long line of, you know, leaders of the great Russian state going back millennia.
00:06:25Trump is just Trump.
00:06:27It's all about him.
00:06:28It's all about his uniqueness.
00:06:29It's got very little to do with the United States.
00:06:31He's acquired the United States.
00:06:33It's part of Trump enterprises.
00:06:35And in every different sense of that matter, this is all about him and how he looks.
00:06:39It's about how people recognize him.
00:06:41He's not thinking about legacy.
00:06:43He doesn't want to be dead.
00:06:44You know, I don't think Putin and Xi want to be dead either.
00:06:46We've got that hot mic, you know, moment where Putin and Xi are talking about organ transplants and longevity and all the rest of it.
00:06:52But they do think of themselves as, you know, basically the inheritors, the carries of a legacy of a great of a great statehood of the Chinese empire or the Russian empire that has to be carried forward into the future.
00:07:04And Trump, it's all again.
00:07:05It's got nothing to do with the United States.
00:07:07It's got nothing to do with the United States.
00:07:09But is it that that makes him particularly vulnerable to Putin?
00:07:14I mean, if you look at the kind of talking points that he echoes coming from and we'll come on to Netanyahu later, I imagine.
00:07:24But if we're dealing with Putin, he tends to echo whatever Putin last seems to have said to him.
00:07:31I mean, and he strongly reflects the Russian perspective, which is why.
00:07:35And I was talking to some people in the intelligence community who kind of laughed off my question as to whether or not he was compromised or Russian agent.
00:07:43They simply said, well, you don't have to worry about the whys and wherefores.
00:07:47It is the that that matters in all things.
00:07:50He is likely or almost certain to reflect the Russian position.
00:07:54But is that how does how does Putin get that out of him, do you think?
00:07:59In part through flattery.
00:08:01I mean, Putin very early on, you know, as I said, figured Trump out.
00:08:05And if you check very carefully, he is very careful about not to insult Trump.
00:08:11Even when he is actually, you know, insulting him, he does it in this kind of veiled, cloaked way that it's, you know, glossed in translation or glossed over in translation so that, you know, Trump doesn't pick up on it.
00:08:24And of course, you know, Trump's not getting packages of the kinds of rude things that are said about him in the Russian press or, you know, on Russian television or the way that, you know, kind of he is presented.
00:08:34There has been a notice sent out in any case by the Kremlin basically telling the Russian media that being too rude about Trump is off limits.
00:08:43You can go after anybody else.
00:08:44And, you know, right now the UK is in the crosshairs in terms of being, you know, the bet noire or the, you know, the main adversary of Russia at different times.
00:08:53It's been places like Georgia or Estonia, you know, kind of it's, you know, it's whatever Russia needs is a kind of a useful enemy of foil in the propaganda realm.
00:09:03But they've been very carefully, just treading carefully around Trump.
00:09:07So that's how Putin keeps his powder dry.
00:09:11And he's got lots of things that Trump wants, which is, again, basically rooted in Putin paying him homage and respect and, you know, and all the rest of it.
00:09:21And look, we've seen how other leaders have done this as well.
00:09:24You know, glossy gifts, you know, great awards, you know, talking about, I mean, Putin's even talked about Trump getting the Nobel Peace Prize, not necessarily for, you know, Ukraine and Russia, because he doesn't want to give, you know, Ukraine up.
00:09:36And he doesn't really want that to be negotiated by Trump.
00:09:38But he, you know, will say it about other things as well.
00:09:42They all know what Trump wants.
00:09:44And again, as I said, it's less about the respect for the United States.
00:09:48It's more about respect for him.
00:09:49And it is about the U.S. insofar as Trump thinks that the United States is an extension of him.
00:09:55Frankly, have you seen Putin take the mickey?
00:09:57I mean, is there something, does he slightly play to his own even local audience when he's dealing with Trump?
00:10:04Are there sort of voce pantomime asides about the widow twanky from the White House?
00:10:10I have.
00:10:10And one of the classic cases for me was in one of the last meetings that I, you know, saw between Trump and Putin, which was at the G20 in Osaka in Japan in 2019.
00:10:24And Putin and Trump in the conversation were doing a bit of chess beating about nuclear missiles and about, you know, whether Russia was ahead of the United States.
00:10:34And then they were also both bragging about how much they were respectively doing for Israel.
00:10:39And I mean, that might sound a bit counterintuitive, but this was a period where the Russians were telling the United States that they were really the great protectors and defenders of Israel.
00:10:49This is obviously a long time, you know, before the attacks of October 7th.
00:10:53And we'd had a meeting in Israel between the National Security Advisors of Israel, the United States and Russia.
00:11:03And, you know, Putin was basically going on about, you know, what Russia was doing.
00:11:07And Trump was saying, well, no, there's no way that, you know, kind of Russia is a bigger support of Israel than, you know, I am.
00:11:14And was talking about all the things that he'd done, you know, for Israel, you know, the capital of Jerusalem, you know, new embassy, et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:20And then Putin said, well, Donald, you know, because Trump was saying they'd named all these things after him.
00:11:27He said, well, maybe they should just name the country after you.
00:11:29And I mean, obviously, I mean, I almost like died laughing because and I could see Bolton and a few other people, you know, Ambassador Bolton, who was still the National Security Advisors, mustache twitch, you know, kind of they'd got the point that, you know, basically he was being trolled.
00:11:45But, you know, the translation itself, you know, was somewhat, you know, glossing over really the kind of the way that Putin said it and the body language, the way he shifted in the seat.
00:11:56And Trump took it at face value and said, oh, no, that would be a bit too much.
00:12:00Straight face.
00:12:01So it's just a total.
00:12:02It was a credible idea, but he wouldn't go for it.
00:12:05Exactly.
00:12:05A credible idea for him.
00:12:06Why not name Israel after me?
00:12:08I mean, look, right now he's trying to get stadiums named after him, things renamed after him from airports to the Kennedy Center, God knows what, the new Trump ballroom.
00:12:17You know, for him sticking his name on things, a country or anything else, isn't that far fetched?
00:12:23It is pretty far fetched, though, isn't it, that he is the president of the United States of America, of America.
00:12:30I mean, obviously, there's the famous episode of The Simpsons, but domestically, we are living, the United States, you, an American citizen now, are living through what the Chinese curse would say, a very interesting times.
00:12:46I mean, how would you characterize and describe the times that you're living through?
00:12:51Is democracy safe in America?
00:12:53It's not safe.
00:12:54But look, democracy is not safe anywhere, including in the UK, and, you know, it has to be renewed by the people themselves.
00:13:01We all have agency.
00:13:02We all have a role in this.
00:13:04It's not going to be necessarily protected from the top when you've got people who are power hungry, which, you know, or, you know, in the case of Trump, hungry for so many different things, you know, in terms of being recognized as a king, you know, the head of the state, you know, the greatest being in the United States out of 330 million people, etc.
00:13:21I mean, obviously, the principles of, you know, democracy and mass participation are out the window there.
00:13:27You've got to also remember that America is a much younger democracy, even though it's 250 years.
00:13:33People will always say that America is a republic, and it was a republic of men.
00:13:36It was a republic of a few men when it was set up.
00:13:39A few white men.
00:13:40Exactly, in 13 colonies.
00:13:43It wasn't the America we see today.
00:13:44So much of America wasn't part of America.
00:13:47And it's really only in my lifetime, I just turned 60 this year, when you get the voters, voter rights, and the civil rights acts of, you know, of that period in the early to mid-60s, that you really get full participation in everything from, you know, voting, you know, to civic life.
00:14:03So, you know, you've got to think that we're talking about an American democracy that's really been vibrant for about 60 years and has gone through so many ups and downs and trials and tribulations.
00:14:14And it's in trouble again.
00:14:16You know, we're kind of going back on ourselves.
00:14:18You've got the breakdown of the two-party system.
00:14:20There's no question about it.
00:14:22Yet, at the same time, you've got this really rigid and, you know, deepening bipartisan sentiment that's become, you know, some people say it's tribal.
00:14:31Some people say it's like, you know, team sports that, you know, you can't imagine, you know, rooting for one team over the other.
00:14:37You've got people who will vote for Trump because he's seen as the head of the Republican Party.
00:14:40But the Republican Party has been taken over by this MAGA group, Make America Great Again, which also has its own trials and tribulations.
00:14:48It's a revolutionary moment.
00:14:50You've got Steve Bannon, you know, who remains an advisor to Trump, talking about this is the Bolshevik Revolution and, you know, himself as Lenin.
00:14:59And that Trump is also an agent of God, I saw in an interview.
00:15:02Well, yes.
00:15:03I mean, you've got this in religious terms as well.
00:15:05I mean, this is one of these, you know, kind of epochal changes.
00:15:08You know, you can think about this at the end of, you know, the Romans in Britain or the end of Pax Augustus and all of the different kind of historic moments that we've thought of.
00:15:19This is historic and it is a challenge to everybody who's living through it to basically see if they can meet the moment.
00:15:27It's not going to be decided by one guy.
00:15:29And, you know, of course, we've got people like Tim Snyder who wrote, you know, the book that remains on the bestseller list on tyranny.
00:15:36He's always saying, you know, don't bend the knee ahead of time, you know, in advance.
00:15:41Because we've seen this happen in so many other countries in Russia as well.
00:15:45Russian's pluralism, it's more democratic leadership and the evolution of its political parties in the Russian parliament.
00:15:55The Russian Duma, you know, was all thrown away over the last 25 years by people basically cashing in their desire for, you know, a better life with Putin in return, you know, for not opposing many of the things that he's done.
00:16:11And that's, you know, essentially what Trump is trying to lay out there.
00:16:15He's trying to lay out a grand bargain, certainly with the billionaire and soon to be trillionaire elite in America rather than the population.
00:16:23But he did tell the population, the people who voted for him, his base, that he was going to make, you know, life better for them.
00:16:28I mean, that's really why so many people voted for Trump, you know, this past time around and really did give him a victory in the popular vote and in the electoral college.
00:16:37You know, unlike his previous election in 2016, it was because he led them to understand that he would make life more affordable, more things accessible for them.
00:16:50And, you know, he hasn't delivered.
00:16:51And so what he's delivering on instead is the kind of thing we've seen in Russia of repression, you know, beefing up the military and the military and the National Guards, domestic activities, this explosion of ice, you know, which is, you know, immigration and customs normally.
00:17:07But now being deployed as a paramilitary force far from the international borders of the United States, Charlotte, North Carolina, you know, kind of the sort of latest victim of all of this.
00:17:18And again, it does feel very much like other countries at other times and the United States at other times as well.
00:17:25I mean, it's in its history.
00:17:26It's just that nobody in living memory has this in their heads of, you know, something like this in the United States.
00:17:33So they're a bit paralysed and trying to figure out, you know, what to do about it.
00:17:37You've hinted at it there.
00:17:38But tell me more about what that what that actually feels like.
00:17:40You know, I mean, does it does it what does it feel like to see ice on your streets, to see the National Guard deployed or the army deployed on the streets of Washington, D.C., the capital of the threat of friction between the federal president and the states.
00:17:59I mean, these are the these are the not just the constitutional norms, but the actual fabrics of democracy, to me, seem to be being rapidly unraveled.
00:18:11Look, I have to say it's a cautionary tale for the UK and for anywhere else in Europe and others watching this, because the United States has prided itself on being exceptional.
00:18:20And I've come over a long period of time to realize it's not so exceptional.
00:18:24So because many of the things that are happening here have happened elsewhere, either in history or in real time, you know, so it's got this kind of feeling of a banana republic at the moment.
00:18:32Although, you know, the communal violence is already there.
00:18:35You know, someone who grew up in the UK in the 60s and 70s.
00:18:39And, you know, I came out to the US in 1989.
00:18:41It feels very much like the times of troubles in Ireland.
00:18:44You know, the kind of use of paramilitary forces, all kinds of excesses, you know, that were, you know, kind of carried out that kind of feeling that something could happen, literally something could blow up at any any point.
00:18:54And that we were far from resolving, you know, these difficulties in finding a formula for that.
00:18:59And again, you know, that kind of populist politics, Trump filling a vacuum, you know, that nobody else has been able to come into politically.
00:19:06But again, this heavy handed use of repression.
00:19:09America's had this before during the Vietnam War, you know, other periods.
00:19:12And, you know, again, it feels like all of this coming together and coming to a head and, you know, very much driven by the fact that so many people have ceded their power, including and especially in the US Congress to Trump.
00:19:27And, you know, again, the political parties, not really parties.
00:19:30Over time, it's become more apparent that they're just vehicles, movements, larger movements for the purposes of only electing a president rather than doing anything else in between.
00:19:40And I think that should be, you know, very evident to anybody else watching this, that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are actually real political parties.
00:19:47And that you've, you know, really entered this realm of personalized politics.
00:19:51Look, the UK faces that.
00:19:52Why is everybody talking about Nigel Farage inevitably becoming prime minister of the UK when he doesn't have a party to speak of?
00:19:59I mean, he's had electoral success in some of the local councils, including my home council in County Durham.
00:20:06But he doesn't have a political party.
00:20:07He doesn't really have a platform.
00:20:09He scavenges on, you know, various political issues, which is exactly what Trump does.
00:20:12I know I'm being quite harsh here.
00:20:13I'm not in a political party.
00:20:15I never would be.
00:20:16You know, I'm an independent.
00:20:16I'm going to call it as I see it.
00:20:18But people have to realize that they've got agency and they've got a responsibility as well.
00:20:22If you want to live in a country that is really addressing, you know, some of the things you're most concerned about, including on affordability and, you know, your chances of, you know, living a decent life, then you've got to take action here and think about it, not think that one guy is going to fix things.
00:20:37And there's not one issue either that's at stake here, be it immigration or anything else.
00:20:41There's no silver bullet.
00:20:42This is going to be difficult.
00:20:43And that's what, you know, real democracy is about.
00:20:46It's about your participation and trying to deal with the issues as well.
00:20:50You know, you can't just take a vacation, a holiday from all of it and sit it out because then things will happen to you inevitably.
00:20:57The complacency may be allowing Trump to get away with what he's done so far in the view of his critics.
00:21:04And I'm on the record for a lot of criticism of Donald Trump.
00:21:09But and you're hinting there that the Democratic Party has really not got its act together and hasn't figured out a way to counteract this.
00:21:17You also live in a country in which there is a huge number of armed people.
00:21:22There are groups of militias.
00:21:24There's been deep suspicion of the, ironically, of the return or attempt to return the monarchy in any form.
00:21:33There is an anti-federalist energy.
00:21:35Is there a possibility or even a likelihood of actual violence?
00:21:41Well, there's violence all the time in America.
00:21:43I mean, it happens every day, every day, precisely for the reasons that you're pointing out here.
00:21:51Mass shootings, you know, school shootings, people resorting to gun violence in any kind of dispute, road rage, you know, you name it.
00:22:02I mean, America is a violent society and, you know, it's always it's always present at any particular time.
00:22:09The question is whether it coalesces, you know, behind anything specific, you know, whether it remains at a kind of community or communal level or it really, you know, translates into something something bigger than that.
00:22:23And, you know, you see already, you know, a lot of resistance, protests and things to, you know, the actions of ICE and National Guard presence.
00:22:33And this is this is a dangerous time.
00:22:35Absolutely for sure.
00:22:36I just can't say exactly how it's going to unfold.
00:22:39You know, is the federal government going to go head to head with some governors, you know, in particular states?
00:22:45Or will, you know, there'll be other formulas.
00:22:47Will Trump just try to buy people off, you know, that he doesn't like?
00:22:50He obviously tries to intimidate everybody.
00:22:52You know, will he continue to get away with sending in the National Guard to other states?
00:22:56Because that was the National Guards of other states.
00:22:58This is very much what Russia has done and the Soviet Union did.
00:23:01You know, you can look back over, you know, Soviet and Russian history and see many episodes of where, you know,
00:23:06the equivalents of the National Guard or the military with soldiers from regiments from different places were sent in to put down local disorder or what was presented as local disorder, which was really protest.
00:23:18The Soviet Union had tens of thousands of protests.
00:23:21We just never heard about them because they were always repressed.
00:23:24And if you think about how the Soviet Union came apart, was picked apart by elites in the final stages.
00:23:30It was because Gorbachev didn't want to do that.
00:23:32He didn't want to continue that practice of shooting at his own people.
00:23:36You know, be there in places like Georgia or in the Baltic states, for example.
00:23:41There was a lot going on in that final stages and Gorbachev pulled back from more oppression, from more having, after several incidents of having soldiers, you know, shoot at Soviet citizens.
00:23:54And that's, you know, kind of really what, you know, Trump is going to have to be called out for.
00:23:58He's trying to delegitimize everybody and legitimize his use of force.
00:24:03I mean, and it's look, it's a big question now for the UK.
00:24:06As to whether to push back against this, the attack on the BBC, for example, that's an attack of the, you know, the very fundaments of UK democracy as well.
00:24:15Not to mention the support for Farage and GB News and, you know, the support for the AFD in Germany or Marine Le Pen, you know, in France.
00:24:24The US under Trump is actively now in ways that, you know, perhaps Latin America was more familiar with and it's doing it there again, you know, in the 1970s.
00:24:34The US is actively involving itself in European politics, or at least, you know, this administration is.
00:24:41That's a fascinating thing.
00:24:43I mean, you allude there, you mentioned the 1970s.
00:24:45That was during the red, the red fear, if you like.
00:24:48It was the CIA toppling democratically elected socialist governments and infiltrating, causing civil wars to prevent the communists, broadly speaking, of getting a foothold.
00:25:00And those communists in the American mind, at any rate, probably in reality, drew their inspiration and funding or direction from Moscow.
00:25:10In terms of Moscow, the communists don't exist anymore.
00:25:13So what is the, you know, why are, why is America attempting to infiltrate effectively European politics and define the debate here?
00:25:25That sort of thing, we can understand to some extent Putin wanting to do that.
00:25:29Why is Donald Trump?
00:25:31Unless, of course, it's to court favour with the Russian Tsar of today.
00:25:37It's all for himself, but it's the same reason as Putin does and actually with the same groups, honestly.
00:25:42But, of course, Trump is bandying around all the time.
00:25:46Marxism, you know, kind of socialist.
00:25:48He's just called Mamdani in New York, although, you know, he tends to talk about that himself.
00:25:53But the other way is that Trump tends to denigrate everybody by calling about the radical left, you know, Antifa, you know, calling everyone out.
00:26:00He's still using that old ideology because, you know, it sells to many people.
00:26:04It still works with, you know, kind of many of the groups.
00:26:07But really what he's trying to do, it's the same as Putin, is to try to basically promote like-minded parties, people who he thinks will, you know, bend a knee to him.
00:26:18And, you know, basically he's trying to influence politics for the United States advantage.
00:26:23Access for trade, you know, more preferential deals, removing regulation, having a free hand in expanding U.S. interests.
00:26:33That's no different from what Putin's doing.
00:26:35Putin says he wants to have demand for Russia all over the place.
00:26:40And that's what Trump wants as well.
00:26:42He wants to have the U.S. having unfettered access.
00:26:46I almost said excess, but, you know, that's kind of another part of this as well.
00:26:50There are some degrees of excess around this as well.
00:26:53But, I mean, he's just seeing Europe, UK included, as vassal states and as, you know, opportunities, you know, for trade.
00:27:00And, again, without any regulation.
00:27:02So I just think that people have to wake up to see that, unfortunately.
00:27:06Look, it's very painful to say that.
00:27:08I never in a million years expected I would be saying things like this.
00:27:11Never in a million years until quite recently.
00:27:15I mean, there has been, ironically, a little bit, not pushback,
00:27:19but there's been a slight evolution of, trying to think of a polite way of putting it,
00:27:27some steel in the spine, should we say, among some European leaders with regard to at least understanding that America,
00:27:35they're not going to be able to hand off all responsibility to America.
00:27:40But there's been no sign, and it intrigues me, that there's been no real sign of people in the centre of politics,
00:27:50or the left even, of actually pushing back at Trump, of actually calling out what is going on.
00:27:59And if they agree with you, which I think many of them do,
00:28:03that to some extent he actually represents a threat to Western Europe and certainly to Western values.
00:28:09Why do you think that is? And indeed, am I right?
00:28:13Well, I think you are right, but I think it's not just a left issue, right?
00:28:16I mean, I think this is the, I said left and then right, but, you know, that's the problem.
00:28:19I don't think we know what left and right are anymore.
00:28:21We've got that, as many people talk about that kind of horseshoe effect of, you know,
00:28:25lots of ideas, you know, kind of coming together and coalescing.
00:28:28I mean, again, you have Steve Bannon talking about himself as Lenin, you know,
00:28:31and a kind of, this is sort of a Leninist, you know, revolution.
00:28:34And, you know, they kind of want to take over.
00:28:36We're talking about, you know, hard right views, you know,
00:28:39the kind of views that frankly, you know, we've seen in the past that are reasserting themselves
00:28:44and it is like to have a very small group of elites, you know,
00:28:48kind of around coalescing around a certain set of ideas and their own values
00:28:51really take over at the expense of everyone else.
00:28:54So, again, this is not really a left-right issue.
00:28:56It's about kind of a question of a sort of hostile takeover and merger, you know,
00:29:00with a lot of people thinking they can make money out of all of this.
00:29:02And seeing, you know, the nation states or, you know, kind of European states and the UK
00:29:07as, you know, targets for hostile takeovers.
00:29:11You know, it is very much businesslike and transactional.
00:29:13I mean, in some cases it is ideological.
00:29:16These guys have, you know, mostly guys have got particular kinds of viewpoints
00:29:20that they want to assert and they want to see everything else in their image.
00:29:24Again, this is a very old story.
00:29:26But it's, and it doesn't mean that this has got to be the direction of travel forever.
00:29:31I mean, the United States remains a very, you know, vibrant society with, I mean,
00:29:37incredible things happening, you know, across the United States and its economy and its polity.
00:29:41It's just that, you know, there is now this administration that's got itself ensconced
00:29:46in its palace in the White House, which is starting to look like Caesar's palace in Las Vegas every moment.
00:29:51You know, kind of taking in that kind of whole idea of being in a casino with meme coins and all kinds of things.
00:29:57You know, we're in a moment, a very, you know, difficult moment for the United States
00:30:01where, you know, kind of things can go in all kinds of different directions.
00:30:06And Europeans need to wake up and understand that.
00:30:09And, you know, if it were, you know, a lot of different European countries are in peril as well.
00:30:13God knows what's going to happen in France.
00:30:15Difficult times in Germany.
00:30:18All kinds of things happening in the United Kingdom.
00:30:20I mean, I think this is just a lesson here that people have to get their act together
00:30:23and they have to decide for themselves what's important to them and then, you know, take that action
00:30:29and not be swayed by ideological precepts.
00:30:33I mean, we're trying to get, you know, people are trying to impose their own ideologies,
00:30:37their own way of thinking on everyone.
00:30:39And that's not what people need at this particular time to deal with all the challenges
00:30:43that, you know, that the world is throwing at us.
00:30:45It's the breakdown of one or just been going on for a very long time
00:30:49and the beginning of something new.
00:30:50And often what happens when you've had some overarching global or certainly larger meta-regional
00:30:57set of orders, you get, you know, something more local for a time before something else is built up.
00:31:02And I think that that's kind of where we're going to have to head.
00:31:05So the UK is going to have to make some, you know, collective decisions, you know, regional and local level,
00:31:10not just at the level of Whitehall and then, you know, start to think about who are its current partners
00:31:17and who can it best, you know, work with, be this on defence and security or in economic terms
00:31:22and, you know, do some reassessment and, you know, kind of think about, you know,
00:31:25how can we best address the challenges we're facing and not have everything driven by the United States.
00:31:30I mean, Trump controls the narrative.
00:31:32Why? He's one guy.
00:31:35And, you know, others are just, you know, kind of basically drafting along, you know,
00:31:39in his wake at this particular moment.
00:31:41And we shouldn't be letting that happen.
00:31:43There needs to be a bigger discussion about this, which is, you know,
00:31:46one of the things that, you know, you're trying to do with this podcast and others are again.
00:31:49And again, I would just challenge people to stop thinking about it in ideological terms
00:31:52because that's been the problem here in the United States,
00:31:55thinking about this in partisan and, you know, this is left and this is right.
00:31:58But, you know, I think you'll kind of find that, you know, the most people in the US and in the UK
00:32:05have shared interest in what they want to see.
00:32:07And it's not a question of whether you've got a left or a right viewpoint.
00:32:10Oh, for me, it's a question of whether or not you've got a democracy in which you can express those and other viewpoints.
00:32:16Yeah. And that's the challenge is kind of not suppressing debate.
00:32:19You know, that's the one thing that, you know, if you try to think charitably about J.D. Vance's Munich speech,
00:32:26which is the kind of height of hypocrisy.
00:32:28But he was right that people are not listening to their populations.
00:32:31And there is, you know, a movement to have more citizens' assemblies,
00:32:34you know, to get people more engaged in debate.
00:32:38You know, it's not just at the parliamentary level in the House of the Parliament,
00:32:43but, you know, kind of in local arenas as well.
00:32:46Podcasts do that, you know, local media does.
00:32:48But we need more of that.
00:32:49We need more of people discussing and thinking about things for themselves.
00:32:52Now, on Ukraine, as I say, I've spent a great deal of time there.
00:32:58And what I find quite interesting about the Trump administration's effect is that it has helped
00:33:07with Putin's movement of this terrible term, the Overton window.
00:33:12The area of kind of acceptable discussion has been shifted from how do we how does the West help defend Ukraine
00:33:22and help Ukraine effectively win through now?
00:33:26The debate centers around how can Ukraine be persuaded to give up on 20 percent of its territory,
00:33:33but preserve what is left over in perpetuity or at least for the foreseeable future.
00:33:41And that is that is essentially to me that delivers a victory to to Putin in and of itself.
00:33:52But if the if Europe is facing these fragmentary factors,
00:33:58all of this provides more opportunity for Putin down the line, doesn't it?
00:34:03In addition to the fact that he may end up illegitimately gaining 20 percent of Ukraine.
00:34:09Yes, sadly, it does.
00:34:10And I mean, again, you know, this is on us to frame this in the in the right way.
00:34:15I mean, what we've got to remember here is that Putin set off to do a special military operation.
00:34:20I mean, he told himself and then everybody around him who, you know,
00:34:23kind of forced into this position that it would be over very quickly.
00:34:26And everybody else outside believed him.
00:34:28You know, if we go back to February 2022, everyone was, you know,
00:34:33pretty convinced that Kiev would fall, so to speak, in a matter of days, if not hours, weeks.
00:34:41In other words, the government capitulate, Zelensky would be off
00:34:45and somebody else would be there installed as a pro-Russian or, you know,
00:34:51certainly very malleable Ukrainian president.
00:34:54Well, that didn't happen.
00:34:55I mean, Putin has lost.
00:34:56He's failed.
00:34:57He failed to get Ukraine in the way that, you know, he intended to.
00:35:01And he's created just an incredible amount of devastation.
00:35:04And what we're trying to do now is blunt his ability to keep on devastating everything, including himself.
00:35:09I mean, over the long run, I mean, I don't foresee that, you know, anytime soon Russia is going to collapse.
00:35:14But he's done incalculable damage to the fabric of Russian society, to its demography, to its economy.
00:35:21It's now, you know, totally war mobilized economy, which is going to be very hard to shift in a different direction,
00:35:28which also points in the way that you've kind of framed this question as to, you know, it doesn't look like this is going to be over anytime soon kind of idea.
00:35:40It also kind of points to the idea that Putin can't give this up because his whole economy, his whole society, his whole politics, his whole preservation of self revolves around having this war go on.
00:35:49I think it's very hard to see how he stops the war, how he moves into peacetime or just moves into more and more problems.
00:35:57Think about the demobilization of all of these people who've gone through the front in Ukraine, in Russia, not just in Ukraine, who come back grievously wounded,
00:36:06not just with prosthetic limbs, but also heavily armed and, you know, knowing how to fight.
00:36:11And that, you know, further criminalization of Russian society, further increase the violence in Russian society.
00:36:17We're talking about that here in the United States.
00:36:19Of having militias and the effect of having so many people cycle through Iraq and Afghanistan on the U.S. front.
00:36:27Well, think about that on the, you know, the Russian front and just that devastating impact.
00:36:32I think it's extraordinarily difficult to think about how you make Putin stop and to miscalculate beyond just making it impossible for him to continue the war,
00:36:43either by making the front line where, you know, Ukraine is now completely defensible from the Ukrainian point of view or just squeezing down Russia's resources.
00:36:55And again, you know, given what you just said about that fragmentation, Putin's kind of betting we're not going to be able to do that.
00:37:01You know, if you look around the kind of a spectrum of Russian opinion, you know, you can see that Russians want this war to stop.
00:37:08Certainly the elites and the technocrats around Putin want it to stop.
00:37:10They've lost a lot from it, but they don't want to have this at a loss to Russia.
00:37:14And Putin's the one person who really doesn't want to stop, want to stop.
00:37:18You can see, again, analysis after analysis that sort of suggests that for Putin, it's easier to continue the war than it is to stop it.
00:37:26And I think that that's something that, you know, Trump and others haven't really picked up on.
00:37:30Trump's got a lot of leverage with Russia.
00:37:32But, you know, Putin, this is about his own self-preservation, the continuation of his own imperial presidency.
00:37:39And, you know, Trump's got much more leverage, which is why we're seeing the way that this discussion has gone about Ukraine to get the Ukrainians to give up and stop.
00:37:47But Ukraine capitulating, Ukraine giving Putin what he has got now isn't sufficient to put an end to this because, again, Putin's not going to demilitarize at this point.
00:37:57He's not going to change the course of the Russian economy.
00:38:00And he's basically created enemies out of most of Europe, even if, you know, some Europeans would love to, you know, get back to business as usual with Russia.
00:38:09That's just really not going to happen.
00:38:11And it's had all these knock-on effects elsewhere.
00:38:13It scared the hell out of all of, you know, U.S. allies, you know, seeing how capricious the United States is being about all of this.
00:38:20It's certainly given, you know, China and others ideas about how they can, you know, probably, you know, kind of put more pressure on Taiwan, you know, to avoid having a ruinous war.
00:38:31It's, you know, let all kinds of other countries around the world see that war can win, you know, if it's done under certain circumstances.
00:38:39It's also shown how ruthless, you know, Putin is and how little he cares about human life, be it Russia's, like, Russians' lives or Ukrainians' lives or anyone else's for that matter.
00:38:50Isn't it interesting, or at least I find it interesting, that at the beginning, back to 2014, when Ukraine was first invaded, the West, most of the West refused to give any kind of lethal aid to the Ukrainians in spite of commitments made to preserve Ukrainian security.
00:39:05Even after 2022 and the full-scale invasion, again, it was very, very slow.
00:39:10There were lots of restrictions on all kinds of weapons.
00:39:12And this will sound familiar.
00:39:14You and I are of the same vintage, that kind of Whitehall official kind of steepling their fingers and men putting their fingertips together and saying, well, we've got to be very careful of defeating the Russians.
00:39:26We all know what happened, you know, in the First World War in 1917 or whatever.
00:39:31And my response was, well, would the world be a dangerous place if the Russian Federation did start to fly apart?
00:39:40It's an imperium.
00:39:41It has large numbers of oppressed peoples within it in terms of the contemporary Russian Federation.
00:39:47From my perspective, as a resident of the West, you know, that would be unstable, but better than having an invading army on our doorstep.
00:39:59Am I wrong?
00:40:00Well, I think if we look at about Russia falling further apart, I mean, that was really the big debate in the 1990s.
00:40:06That's actually what, you know, Putin himself has capitalized upon.
00:40:10I mean, he comes into the presidency as a wartime president against Chechnya, if we, you know, think back that far.
00:40:17Because Chechnya was that response to the, you know, the removal of the Soviet Union, the Chechens, you know, thought they had a really good case to say, well, we can go too.
00:40:27We have a million people.
00:40:28We're on a border now, an international border.
00:40:31You know, we've got kind of history of separateness, of otherness, you know.
00:40:34And if all of these other, you know, former Soviet republics, Ukraine, Belarus, you know, you name it, can go, well, why can't we too?
00:40:41Well, the Russian Federation internally wasn't, you know, set up the same way as the Soviet Union, which actually did give the rights, you know, to republics.
00:40:47It's just a seed, even if, you know, there was no expectation that they were going to actually exercise those.
00:40:52And, of course, we saw an absolutely ruinous, horrific war, you know, which was the biggest conflict on Russian soil since World War II, you know, preceding now this incredible land war that we now have in the case of Ukraine.
00:41:06And, you know, the Russians eventually, under Putin by, you know, rather horrific methods, subjugated and repressed the Chechens.
00:41:14I don't think that we're likely to see anyone try, you know, the Chechen secession again in Russia.
00:41:21But I think we can really see the weakening of the center happening again, as it was in the 1990s under Yeltsin, you know, with various republics having to take matters into their own hands more and, you know, kind of spinning away, you know, further and further from Moscow.
00:41:35And you're already seeing other former, you know, Soviet states, you know, all the countries that Russia try to keep under its grip, you know, doing a lot of things themselves.
00:41:45That's really been a consequence of this conflict.
00:41:49I mean, you know, Azerbaijan, you know, looking to the West to help them, you know, kind of broker a peace deal and not wanting kind of Russia, you know, involved.
00:41:56The Georgians, even though they've kind of moved back towards Russia still being, you know, kind of much more cautious about this, Kazakhstan, you know, other countries trying to, you know, make it out of the exits, Moldova, you know, Belarus is stuck because of its, you know, support for Putin in the war in Ukraine and also because they've got this union treaty.
00:42:14But you can really see these centrifugal forces already there at work.
00:42:20And, you know, Putin is worried about that.
00:42:22Absolutely.
00:42:23You know, he's worried about that, which is, again, why he wants to show that war wins.
00:42:26And that, you know, Ukraine can't completely get away because, you know, yes, he is worried about that.
00:42:32Now, should the rest of us be worried?
00:42:33I think what the rest of us should be worried about is, you know, this kind of failing, flailing, you know, Russian state kept together with repression with a lot of internal violence and, you know, kind of more of a desire to lash out at all of us.
00:42:48But they're doing that all the time anyway.
00:42:49Right.
00:42:49So this isn't something that, you know, we've got to just look forward in the future.
00:42:53It's happening now.
00:42:54That's why I keep saying we're at war with Russia, even though I get, you know, pushback against this all the time.
00:42:59You know, the acts of sabotage and what just happened in Poland, you know, all kinds of, you know, lasers and sensors and GPS blocking.
00:43:06And, you know, people say, well, that's not really war, hybrid war.
00:43:09Well, Putin thinks it is.
00:43:10You know, Putin's trying to do whatever he can to subvert and to, you know, basically, you know, have a war by means other than having an outright confrontation with NATO.
00:43:20But he's certainly confronting NATO.
00:43:22He's certainly trying to expand, you know, the fields of battle and information propaganda.
00:43:27In fact, he seems to be winning.
00:43:28I mean, all the time that, you know, I hear, you know, people taking Russia's side and Russia's talking points.
00:43:35You know, he's definitely got the edge in the propaganda and information wars because people, you know, were more likely to, you know, feel very negatively and badly about their own countries.
00:43:44I mean, all of us, you know, criticize our own country because that's what democracy is for.
00:43:47But, you know, that doesn't mean that we should then, you know, be feeding into celebrating what Putin's doing or saying that, you know, Russia's got it right is, you know, a lot of, you know, we see the far right doing right now in the United States and elsewhere.
00:44:01But in that regard, Putin has managed to create a lot of, you know, fellow travelers, you know, strange bedfellows, perhaps, but not so much because, you know, Putin has, you know, you're saying before he has the ear of Trump and he has, you know, basically a lot of capacity to influence others as well.
00:44:16He's got a lot of money that he's sloshing around.
00:44:19You know, for Putin, this is war.
00:44:20This isn't peace.
00:44:21This is all a kind of a war for Russia's status in Europe and for its position.
00:44:26But it seems incredible to me that a country with an economy that small, yes, it's got a lot of people, it's got a lot of landmass, but it's got a relatively small economy in comparison.
00:44:36We just talk about the European Union, even minus the United Kingdom, which sadly is no longer in the European Union.
00:44:42But you're still looking at some 500 million plus people, a gigantic economic bloc that has a massive capacity that seems to me to be largely unused in defence of itself against.
00:45:01He gets a hell of a bang for his buck, doesn't he?
00:45:03Yes, he really does.
00:45:05And I mean, the patterns that he has perfected, other people are emulating now because they've seen how successful he can be.
00:45:12I think, you know, Putin's the first populist president of the 21st century.
00:45:17He certainly, you know.
00:45:17Which is ironic given that he's an authoritarian, didn't get elected.
00:45:20Yeah, but this is authoritarian populism, you know, it's kind of, and a lot of these other people prefer not to get elected and just to, look, Trump keeps talking about not bothering to have elections again, you know, and it'll be, you know, not much of a surprise if that's the same viewpoint of the AFD or, you know, the Le Pen, you know, acolytes of, you know, people in the UK.
00:45:40You know, it's just like, just dispense with it all.
00:45:43You know, we'd much rather be able to assert our authority and to manipulate the media.
00:45:48And that's, again, why it's so important to have discussions like this and for everybody to be having these discussions.
00:45:54Make up your own bloody mind.
00:45:56You know, don't just let them tell you what you should be thinking.
00:45:59And I mean, that's actually why I always have an aversion to ideology because it's kind of people get, you know, so, you know, caught up in their ideologies and just the simplicity and the beauty and the attractive.
00:46:10It's like a realist theory or that theory.
00:46:13And, you know, it kind of makes sense of a very complicated world.
00:46:17Well, the world is very complicated and there's no, you know, kind of, you know, one way of kind of reaching answers.
00:46:23I mean, there are often really there are right answers, you know, to be got there.
00:46:26There is a truth that's out there.
00:46:27But sometimes it's difficult to get to it because you have to deal with this all of this complexity.
00:46:31You have to ask a lot of questions.
00:46:33You have to be open to hearing, you know, different sides of an argument.
00:46:37And that's what these guys are not.
00:46:38Trump and Putin are both people telling you what to think.
00:46:41Look, what Trump has just said, he called, you know, a journalist, you know, kind of a piggy for asking a question.
00:46:47Or said that somebody else was insubordinate, another woman, you know, from asking a question.
00:46:51Didn't like the way questions were asked.
00:46:53Don't let people tell you you can't answer.
00:46:55You can't ask questions and find answers for yourself.
00:46:58This is what this attack on the BBC is about.
00:47:00You know, it's not about, you know, kind of just, you know, really bad editing job, you know, as a panorama.
00:47:06It's about, you know, getting rid of an institution like the BBC that for all its flaws was set up to be a kind of a GPS for information for people being able to ask questions and to get answers to them.
00:47:17And back in the 1920s, at exactly the same time that the Soviet Union, with its big propagandist machine, was being set up, people seem to forget, as they're always quoting Orwell, that Orwell worked for the BBC.
00:47:28You know, and although everyone has criticised it, the whole idea was that it was supposed to be there as a source of information for people, you know, to be able to make up their own minds.
00:47:38You know, it was also set up to give producers as much autonomy as they're liked in the way that you have it, you know, kind of not as part of the BBC, but as part of the kind of independent and, you know, thinking about podcasts.
00:47:50Everyone was supposed to be that equivalent of people who could go out there and, you know, try to ask questions, not necessarily shape the answers, but actually be able to ask questions and have debate and discourse.
00:48:01And that's why, you know, an attack on that kind of institution is an attack on everybody, an attack on everybody's, you know, ability to access information and to be able to ask questions and have a healthy conversation and discourse about issues.
00:48:17The British government, has it been pusillanimous in its dealings with Trump? Are we being too wet?
00:48:25I think being in a very weak position. But, you know, look, you can look at Putin and you just said this again, you know, you can pair a weak hand very effectively and we need to just do better at that.
00:48:37You know, this is what should they be doing?
00:48:38Well, they should be building up, you know, different ways of building up their own resources and, you know, leaning into that and moving more quickly and being bolder.
00:48:47I mean, I know that, you know, again, the government is running scared of both the left and the right at the moment, but there are all kinds of things that can be done and you need to not be afraid of your public.
00:48:55You need to have open conversation and you need to not just think of everything through the prism of London either.
00:49:01You need to have, you know, real capacity and enabling power given to other parts of Britain and to give people a voice and, you know, kind of a chance to be able to do things for themselves.
00:49:11And that's the thing I found incredibly frustrating about the UK.
00:49:14You know, I took part in the strategic, you know, defense review as one of the reviewers.
00:49:18I found actually that's a very uplifting exercise as well as, you know, somewhat horrifying and, you know, all the kind of ways that one would, you know, think about worrying about the future of UK defense and the capacities that it had.
00:49:30But I also found it uplifting because we did engage with a very large number of people, 8,000 submissions on how people should think about defense.
00:49:39We had cities and assemblies of people who went to bases and talked to people and people had great ideas.
00:49:45And there was there was a real discourse happening that, you know, seems to have not died a death, but kind of become more muted, you know, after that.
00:49:53But the frustrating thing is that people can't look outside of Whitehall.
00:49:57The big thing where things kind of got held up was this cross Whitehall.
00:50:02Well, what about cross country?
00:50:04What about thinking about, you know, kind of the various nations of the United Kingdom?
00:50:09It isn't just about England.
00:50:10You know, I got to the north of England and there's all these George, St. George flags put everywhere.
00:50:15But what is England?
00:50:16There is not even a debate about, you know, how different London is from all of the other, you know, UK regions, how different the northeast of England is from Greater Manchester, you know, for example.
00:50:27How do you get a kind of place shaped approach to these things?
00:50:31You know, England is not the sum of even parts at this point.
00:50:36And with the devolution of power, you know, to Scotland and tax levying, you know, capacity and to some degree, some devolution to Wales and, you know, autonomy for Northern Ireland and kind of going back to, you know, self-rule.
00:50:50We need to be thinking, you know, more actively about the future of England and not have Vladimir Putin thinking about that for everybody or, you know, Donald Trump shaping that.
00:50:59You know, it's not just a question of, you know, the separation of, you know, powers between Parliament and the monarchy.
00:51:06I mean, Trump's obsessed about the king and the royal family at the moment.
00:51:09But how does England function within the United Kingdom, not just, you know, Scotland and Wales?
00:51:15And how does all of this, you know, get bound together?
00:51:17I mean, I would just challenge people to just go and travel north and just see how much things change there because so many parts of Britain are not just left behind, that left out of mind.
00:51:28And that was really something that I thought was even, you know, a feature of the Strategic Defence Review, a lot of focus on Barrow and Furnace.
00:51:35How many people have actually been to Barrow and Furnace is a good question.
00:51:37You know, I have to rent a car whenever I visit the north because you just can't get there from here on so many, you know, kind of levels.
00:51:46You know, the lack of discussion now about transportation.
00:51:50You know, UK is not mobile.
00:51:51People just can't get from here to there in many, you know, different places, let alone social mobility, geographic mobility.
00:51:57And sometimes, you know, the UK doesn't feel fit for purpose and it's not going to be, you know, basically resolved by debates from the left or the right or, you know, kind of about just immigration.
00:52:10There's going to be, I mean, that's a big issue, a really big issue.
00:52:13I think there should be a commission, you know, put together this for a sensible discussion about it, not a politicized discussion, although it's very hard given, you know, the raw feelings about this for understandable reasons.
00:52:23But there are so many issues that have to be, you know, decided on a national level, not just in one place for one place and by people from one place.
00:52:32And that, I think, is, you know, the real challenge that the UK faces right now.
00:52:36It sounds to me that sort of from a kind of emotional but also a deeply intellectual perspective, you're kind of, you're seeing a lack of ideas when you're back in the old country.
00:52:48I mean, a lack of boldness.
00:52:50I don't know we are short of ideas.
00:52:51I just think we're just not engaging everybody in coming up with those ideas.
00:52:55Lots of great ideas.
00:52:56They just don't get implemented because they can't get traction because, you know, there's only one way into the system.
00:53:02You know, how is Nigel Farage getting so much traction?
00:53:04Because all the media is focused on him all the time.
00:53:07He's got his own GB news.
00:53:09I mean, this is just, again, everybody now is a media personality.
00:53:13And, you know, how do you kind of break through all that noise?
00:53:17Well, again, I think you have to take things back to the regional and local level.
00:53:19And that's, you know, supposedly what MPs are supposed to be doing.
00:53:22It's not what's happening in the US Congress.
00:53:24They're not representing their constituencies.
00:53:26You know, and they've ceded, you know, any authority to Trump.
00:53:31But, you know, I mean, I think this is a challenge for the UK and a particular challenge of articulating, you know, what power and responsibility means in an English context.
00:53:40What is England? You know, if you look at northeast England, for example, the northeast, it's got a much stronger regional identity that has an English identity, despite, you know, the appearance of St. George flags.
00:53:52It's as strong an identity as it is in Wales and Scotland.
00:53:55Other places less so.
00:53:56I think you need to have much more of a sense of being in, you know, communion and in communication with the rest of the country.
00:54:04I think, you know, that's why, you know, Whitehall or the political parties have kind of lost their way.
00:54:09They're not getting full representation, full voice, you know, from from the country.
00:54:15Is this why you constantly hear this sort of panic stations in both the Labour and in the past in the Tory party about the so-called Red Wall?
00:54:22I mean, I've always been kind of amused by this idea that there was some kind of sort of tribal group that needed to be appealed to or fed some kind of red meat of politics up there somewhere in in the windswept north where people have unintelligible accents, which I know with relief that you've moderated for my benefit.
00:54:46I've got my dad's telephone voice on.
00:54:48My dad always would laugh at him and we'd go on the telephone and say, what are you doing?
00:54:53He says, well, you know, people have got to understand me.
00:54:56So my dad's telephone voice is, you know, in operation right now because that's exactly the issue.
00:55:01Look, it's a two millennia problem, a two millennia old problem.
00:55:04The Romans had the same, you know, issue.
00:55:06They built a bloody wall, a real wall, not just a red wall, a stone wall up there because they also had the same kind of problems of not wanting to devolve power.
00:55:14I mean, Rome never devolved power from Rome, although they had, you know, consuls and, you know, kind of governors and things that they kind of sent out there to run everything from the center and then from, you know, the various forts all the way into places.
00:55:26And we've got the same the same problem there.
00:55:29I think, you know, people don't really understand their own country.
00:55:32And, you know, I would just challenge people to just let you all get out of London and go and see your own country.
00:55:38It's not that big.
00:55:39The UK is not that big.
00:55:40I mean, I talk to, you know, Americans who've spent time in England and one of them, in fact, I was meeting with yesterday or the UK kind of quipped at me that, you know, that they really, you know, understood that for the first time that history, you know, kind of is the US context of a couple of hundred years is not very long.
00:55:58But that they could never get their heads around that, you know, 200 miles was a really long way in a kind of an English sense where it's, you know, just a day trip, you know, kind of in a US context, not quite, but, you know, kind of not far off.
00:56:10And I think that that's kind of people's mental maps of Britain seems to be enormous.
00:56:16You know, the Romans exaggerated the size of Scotland to justify why they couldn't take it over.
00:56:20But, you know, this is a kind of a, you know, a perpetual problem, I think, for people in the UK.
00:56:26They need to get a better grip of their own country.
00:56:28And then they wouldn't be running so scared and, you know, freaked out by the idea of, you know, this implacable group of God knows who with, again, as you said, impenetrable accents in different places, wanting something that they don't know about.
00:56:41Everybody wants the same thing.
00:56:42They want to have the ability to lead a reasonably good life, a decent life for themselves and for their families.
00:56:48Not everybody wants a bloody yacht or, you know, to cloak their house in gold and have a gold toilet, you know, in every bathroom.
00:56:55People, you know, want to be able to kind of, you know, hope to have a good education, be able to get a job, you know, have skills, you know, have a chance, you know, to not be living in poverty.
00:57:06That's kind of, you know, the basic bottom line here.
00:57:09You mentioned Rome and we're coming to the end of my time slot with you.
00:57:12So I've got two last questions.
00:57:13You mentioned Rome there and it always triggers in me mention of Rome, the notion that the West is going through a decline and the next stage is a fall.
00:57:27Is this, are we at the end of the Western era?
00:57:31Definitely the end of this particular version of it.
00:57:34So, you know, we're in one of those periods, definitely, of change.
00:57:42You know, I hesitate to use the word transition because we used to look about, we used to talk about that in, you know, the Soviet Union, the idea that, you know, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia was in transition to something we thought was meant to become France or Poland or, you know, kind of some other country.
00:57:56Yeah. And as you remember that, you know, it just transitioned to being itself again, you know, kind of, you know, so I think, you know, we are going to find different formulations here.
00:58:07You know, I've been thinking a lot about Rome, you know, as I look at what's happening in the White House.
00:58:11And again, you know, Trump looks like he's building Caesar's Palace Vegas style, you know, all the time.
00:58:15Yeah, or Caligula. Is there going to be a horse in the Senate?
00:58:17Yeah, there's just all kinds of, you know, things that we realise that there's nothing really new in the world and history definitely rhymes.
00:58:24And, you know, we come back on ourselves, even as we're always moving forward.
00:58:28And I think that's the thing to bear in mind.
00:58:29We always move forward, even if, you know, some of the problems of the past, you know, rear their heads again, which is certainly the case now.
00:58:37I mean, we are in a period reminiscent of the 1920s, as I said before, which is, again, the end of, you know, really those mononarchical eras, the imperial eras, the end of empires that, you know, had the collapse of the Kaiser and the German Reich, which actually wasn't very long lived anyway since the, you know, unification of Germany in the 1870s.
00:58:57We definitely had the collapse of the British Empire as a result of that, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire.
00:59:03You know, we left that imperial age and moved on to something else.
00:59:07And, you know, I think we're leaving the end of a world dominated by the United States and the United States is giving it up.
00:59:14But, you know, maybe we're also for a period leaving, you know, kind of an age that has to be dominated by centres.
00:59:21And, you know, America is not going to be calling the shots anymore, but it's also not going to be what we saw in the past.
00:59:27This is not going to be in a battle of the great titans, not in a bipolar or multipolar, even if we feel all a bit bipolar at the moment, in a multipolar world.
00:59:38It's not just going to be, you know, the United States, China and Russia in the place of the Soviet Union duking it out.
00:59:44We've got Brazil, we've got Indonesia, we've got India, we've got, you know, South Africa, we've got all kinds of countries, the Gulf states, the Saudis, you know, got the, you know, all of these players out there.
00:59:55And, you know, we could go on and on who would like their time in the sun as well.
00:59:59And they're thinking about regional orders and new ways of interacting.
01:00:02So we're in a time of change.
01:00:05And then we've got all the rapid change that we're seeing from technological change, emergence of AI.
01:00:10It's just a difficult period, you know, climate change, whether people want to deny it or not, things are definitely in flux here.
01:00:16And so we've got to figure out how do we adapt to that?
01:00:19How do we deal with that?
01:00:21And what is going to make the most sense in that context?
01:00:23Whereas maybe there's going to be multiple centres rather than one centre that dominates everything.
01:00:29So my last question with all of my interviewees in the world of travel is, do we have any reasons to be cheerful, to quote the great Ian Dury?
01:00:39We do.
01:00:40And, you know, Ian Dury himself is somebody who overcame incredible adversity.
01:00:45I mean, he had polio.
01:00:47Yeah.
01:00:47And, you know, I mean, and kept on going.
01:00:50And, you know, and an incredible spirit.
01:00:52I loved Ian Dury and the blockhead.
01:00:54You know, so I think that that's what we need.
01:00:55We need a bit more of a blockhead in the sense of keeping on going, you know, basically remembering that we do have agency.
01:01:02We can do things.
01:01:03And we've just got to remember.
01:01:05You remember that.
01:01:06Well, look, this is another crisis.
01:01:07It just might not be taking the forms that we're familiar with.
01:01:11But it is a crisis.
01:01:12Britain is under siege.
01:01:13Information, you know, wise, politically, you know, many other ways, you know, literally trying to deal with floods of people coming in, not really knowing how to manage all of this.
01:01:23We need to get our act together.
01:01:24We can get our act together.
01:01:26We've done it before.
01:01:27And honestly, we can do it again.
01:01:28But it won't be necessarily through silver bullets coming out of Whitehall.
01:01:33I mean, the UK is replete with actually great stories.
01:01:36If we go out and look for them rather than just having the, you know, the American carnage or UK carnage approach and listening constantly to Nigel Farage or anybody else, you know, talking the country down all the time.
01:01:47Fiona, Fiona Hill.
01:01:48Thank you so much.
01:01:50That was fascinating.
01:01:51And I wish I could talk for another, steal another hour of your time.
01:01:58And any chance you're going to come back here and get into politics?
01:02:01It sounds like we could probably do with you.
01:02:04I don't want to run for government because, again, you end up having to pander, you know, to special interests.
01:02:09And, you know, kind of I think that what we need to do is, again, keep motivating people to do things for themselves in civil society.
01:02:17So I'm trying to, you know, kind of find a way, you know, of a platform for this.
01:02:22I don't want to be out there, you know, because, you know, when you're out there asking for people's vote or asking for people's money, you want something, right?
01:02:28I don't want anything.
01:02:29I want to see some change as well.
01:02:30And I want to see how I can be part of making that change happen.
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