Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump

00:00:00.000 | We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well.

00:00:02.840 | We've got to understand how the guy thinks

00:00:04.720 | and why he thinks like he does.

00:00:06.560 | He has got his own context and his own frame

00:00:10.640 | and his own rationale.

00:00:12.520 | And he is rational.

00:00:13.480 | He is a rational actor in his own context.

00:00:16.280 | We've got to understand that.

00:00:17.120 | We've got to understand that he would take offense

00:00:19.000 | at something and he would take action over something.

00:00:21.520 | It doesn't mean to say that we are necessary to blame

00:00:25.500 | by taking actions, but we are to blame

00:00:27.160 | when we don't understand the consequences

00:00:29.120 | of things that we do and act accordingly

00:00:32.160 | or take preventative action or recognize

00:00:35.160 | that something might happen as a result of something.

00:00:37.520 | - What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine

00:00:40.800 | with a tactical nuclear weapon?

00:00:42.680 | The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill,

00:00:47.600 | a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert

00:00:50.280 | specializing in Russia.

00:00:52.140 | She has served the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations,

00:00:55.760 | including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump.

00:01:00.200 | She has made it to the White House from Humble Beginnings

00:01:03.000 | in the North of England, a story she tells in her book,

00:01:07.400 | "There's Nothing for You Here."

00:01:09.600 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:11.680 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:13.840 | in the description.

00:01:15.120 | And now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill.

00:01:18.900 | You came from Humble Beginning in a coal mining town

00:01:23.240 | in Northeast England.

00:01:24.580 | So what were some formative moments in your young life

00:01:28.040 | that made you the woman you are today?

00:01:31.440 | - I was born in 1965 and it was the period

00:01:34.160 | where the whole coal sector in Britain

00:01:37.680 | was in decline already.

00:01:39.680 | And basically, my father, by the time I came along,

00:01:43.680 | had lost his job multiple times.

00:01:45.360 | Every coal mine he worked in was closing down.

00:01:47.760 | He was looking constantly for other work

00:01:49.800 | and he had no qualifications because at age 14,

00:01:52.880 | he'd gone down the mines.

00:01:54.460 | His father had gone down the mines at 13.

00:01:56.320 | His great-grandfather around the same kind of age.

00:01:58.780 | I mean, you had a lot of people at different points

00:02:01.260 | going down coal mines at 12, 13, 14.

00:02:04.280 | They didn't get educated beyond that period

00:02:06.680 | because the expectation was,

00:02:07.920 | "Hey, you're gonna go down the mine

00:02:09.080 | like everybody else in your family."

00:02:11.520 | And then he didn't really have any other qualifications

00:02:14.560 | to basically find another job

00:02:17.800 | beyond something in manual labor.

00:02:19.320 | So he worked in a steelworks.

00:02:21.400 | That didn't work out.

00:02:22.240 | A brickworks, that closed down.

00:02:24.000 | And then he went to work in the local hospital,

00:02:26.200 | part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom

00:02:28.220 | as a porter, an orderly.

00:02:29.560 | So basically, somebody's just pushing people around.

00:02:32.080 | There was no opportunity to retrain.

00:02:34.460 | So the big issue in my family was education.

00:02:38.040 | You've gotta have one.

00:02:39.280 | You've gotta have some qualifications.

00:02:41.280 | The world is changing.

00:02:42.400 | It's changing really quickly.

00:02:44.040 | And for you to kind of keep up with it,

00:02:45.400 | you're gonna have to get educated

00:02:48.680 | and find a way out of this.

00:02:50.280 | And very early on, my father had basically said to me,

00:02:53.180 | "There's nothing for you here.

00:02:54.920 | You're gonna have to, if you want to get ahead."

00:02:57.800 | And he didn't have any kind of idea

00:02:59.280 | that as a girl, I wouldn't.

00:03:00.360 | I mean, actually, in many respects,

00:03:01.560 | I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy.

00:03:04.080 | There was no expectation that I would go into industry.

00:03:07.400 | There was some kind of idea that maybe

00:03:10.720 | if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse.

00:03:12.400 | My mother was a midwife.

00:03:13.880 | And so she'd, at age 16, left school

00:03:16.080 | and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife.

00:03:19.680 | I had other relatives who'd gone to teach in local schools.

00:03:23.780 | And so there was an idea that women could get educated

00:03:26.700 | and there was a kind of a range of things that you could do.

00:03:29.460 | But the expectation then was,

00:03:31.920 | go out there, do something with your life,

00:03:34.800 | but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave.

00:03:36.940 | So all of that was circling around me,

00:03:40.300 | particularly in my teenage years,

00:03:42.060 | as I was trying to find my way through life

00:03:45.380 | and looking forward.

00:03:47.780 | - First of all, what does that even look like,

00:03:50.560 | getting educated, given the context of that place?

00:03:53.520 | You don't know.

00:03:54.360 | There's a whole world of mystery out there.

00:03:56.480 | So how do you figure out what to actually do out there?

00:03:58.960 | But was there moments, formative moments,

00:04:02.040 | either challenging or just inspiring,

00:04:04.740 | where you wondered about what you want to be,

00:04:08.400 | where you want to go?

00:04:09.360 | - Yeah, there were a number of things.

00:04:10.800 | I mean, I think like a lot of kids,

00:04:12.320 | you talk to people,

00:04:13.920 | and particularly from blue collar backgrounds,

00:04:15.680 | said, "What did you want to do?"

00:04:16.760 | Boys might say, "I wanted to be a fireman."

00:04:18.900 | Or you got kind of...

00:04:20.940 | At one point, when I was a little girl,

00:04:22.300 | I wanted to be a nurse.

00:04:23.220 | I had a little nurse's uniform like my mother.

00:04:25.180 | I didn't really know what that meant,

00:04:26.380 | but I used to go around pretending to be a nurse.

00:04:28.940 | I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy,

00:04:31.500 | and I used to read this.

00:04:33.180 | And that was one of the formative ideas.

00:04:36.180 | We also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area,

00:04:38.540 | and I'd be out in the fields all the time,

00:04:41.020 | and I'd watch farmers with their animals,

00:04:43.620 | and I'd see vets coming along

00:04:45.060 | and watching people deal with the livestock.

00:04:48.060 | And there was a kind of a famous story at the time

00:04:50.420 | about a vet called James Herriot.

00:04:52.980 | It became here in the United States as well,

00:04:54.940 | and was a sort of a TV miniseries.

00:04:56.460 | He'd written a book, and he was the vet

00:04:57.780 | for one of my great aunt's dogs.

00:05:01.060 | And people were always talking about him,

00:05:02.380 | and I thought, "Oh, I could be a vet."

00:05:03.940 | And then one day I saw one of the local vets

00:05:05.820 | with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field,

00:05:08.780 | and he'd got his hand stuck, and the cow was kicking him.

00:05:10.580 | And I thought, "Yeah, maybe not, actually.

00:05:13.260 | No, I don't think I want to be a vet."

00:05:15.780 | So I cycled through all of these things about,

00:05:17.500 | okay, I could get an education,

00:05:18.860 | but the whole sense was you had to apply your education.

00:05:21.540 | It wasn't an education for education's sake.

00:05:23.820 | It was an education to do something.

00:05:26.060 | And when I was about 14 or 15,

00:05:28.060 | my local member of parliament came to the school,

00:05:31.060 | and it was one of these pep talks

00:05:32.900 | for kids in these deprived areas.

00:05:35.340 | He had been quite prominent in local education,

00:05:38.980 | and now he was a member of parliament.

00:05:40.340 | He himself had come from a really hard-scrabble background,

00:05:43.140 | and had risen up through education.

00:05:44.780 | He'd even gone to Oxford

00:05:45.820 | and done philosophy, politics, and economics.

00:05:48.620 | And he basically told my class,

00:05:50.780 | even though it was highly unlikely

00:05:52.220 | any of us were really going to get ahead

00:05:53.940 | and go to elite institutions,

00:05:55.580 | "Look, you can get an education.

00:05:56.940 | You don't have to be held back by your circumstances.

00:05:59.620 | But if you do get an education, it's a privilege,

00:06:01.620 | and you need to do something with it."

00:06:03.820 | So then I'm thinking, "Well, what could I do?"

00:06:06.700 | Okay, an education's a qualification.

00:06:08.580 | It's to do something.

00:06:09.700 | Most people around me I knew didn't have careers.

00:06:12.660 | I mean, my dad didn't really have a career.

00:06:13.900 | He had jobs.

00:06:15.060 | My mom thought of her nursing as a career, though,

00:06:17.940 | and it genuinely was,

00:06:19.020 | and she was out there trying to help women

00:06:21.780 | survive childbirth.

00:06:23.260 | My mother had these horrific stories,

00:06:26.020 | basically over the dining room table,

00:06:27.620 | that she'd stop, she'd leave out her nursing books.

00:06:29.860 | And I tell you, if everyone had had my mom as a mother,

00:06:32.860 | there'd be no reproduction on the planet.

00:06:35.380 | It was just these grim, horrific stories

00:06:37.300 | of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors

00:06:40.700 | that my sister and I would just go,

00:06:41.980 | "Oh my God, you know, what?

00:06:43.660 | Please stop."

00:06:45.140 | So I thought, "Well, you know,

00:06:46.420 | I don't necessarily want to go in that direction."

00:06:50.180 | But it was the timing that really cinched things for me.

00:06:54.340 | I was very lucky that the region that I grew up,

00:06:56.500 | County Durham, despite the massive decline,

00:06:59.220 | deindustrialization, and the complete collapse

00:07:02.580 | of the local government system around me,

00:07:06.020 | still maintained money for education.

00:07:08.420 | And they also paid for exchanges.

00:07:10.180 | And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany,

00:07:14.060 | in France, also in Russia, in Kostroma, near Yaroslavl,

00:07:17.700 | for example, an old textile town,

00:07:19.220 | similar down in its kind of region,

00:07:21.660 | but quite historic in the Russian context.

00:07:24.700 | In fact, the original birthplace

00:07:27.300 | of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma,

00:07:29.540 | just as County Durham was quite a distinguished,

00:07:32.020 | historic area in the British context.

00:07:34.500 | And so it was an idea that I could go on exchanges,

00:07:36.460 | I could learn languages.

00:07:37.620 | I studied German, I studied French.

00:07:40.380 | And then in 1983, there was the war scare,

00:07:44.620 | basically provoked by the Euro Missile Crisis.

00:07:48.420 | So the stationing of new categories

00:07:50.300 | of strategic nuclear weapons

00:07:51.740 | and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe

00:07:56.300 | and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War.

00:07:59.820 | And this Euro Missile Crisis over SS-20

00:08:01.940 | and Pershing missiles went on from 1977,

00:08:05.060 | so when I was about 11 or 12,

00:08:07.060 | all the way through into the later part of the 1980s.

00:08:11.220 | And in 1983, we came extraordinarily close

00:08:15.220 | to a nuclear conflict.

00:08:17.140 | It was very much another rerun

00:08:19.780 | of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

00:08:22.220 | So 20 years on, same kind of thing.

00:08:24.740 | The Soviets misread,

00:08:26.020 | although I didn't know this at the time,

00:08:27.180 | I know a lot of this after the fact,

00:08:29.300 | but the tension was palpable.

00:08:31.140 | But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions

00:08:33.940 | of a series of exercises, Operation Able Archer,

00:08:38.500 | that the United States was conducting

00:08:40.220 | and actually thought that the United States

00:08:41.820 | might be preparing for a first nuclear strike.

00:08:44.300 | And that then set up a whole set

00:08:46.140 | of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union.

00:08:49.500 | Eventually, it was recognized that all of this

00:08:52.100 | was really based on misperceptions.

00:08:54.980 | And of course, that later led to negotiations

00:08:57.500 | between Gorbachev and Reagan

00:08:59.780 | for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces, the INF Treaty.

00:09:02.580 | But in 1983, that tension was just acute.

00:09:05.940 | And for us as a teenager,

00:09:07.460 | we were basically being prepped the whole time

00:09:09.860 | for the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon.

00:09:14.260 | There were TV series, films in the United States

00:09:17.740 | and the UK, threads the day after.

00:09:19.780 | We had all these public service announcements

00:09:21.420 | telling us to seek sanctuary or cover

00:09:24.980 | in the inevitability of a nuclear blast.

00:09:26.700 | And my house was so small,

00:09:28.380 | they said, "Look for a room without a window."

00:09:30.620 | There were no rooms without windows.

00:09:31.980 | My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window

00:09:35.140 | and said if there was a nuclear flash,

00:09:37.220 | we'd have to get down on the floor, not look up,

00:09:39.700 | but the curtains would help.

00:09:40.700 | And we were like, "This is ridiculous, Dad."

00:09:42.380 | And we would all try to see if we could squeeze

00:09:44.180 | in the space under the stairs,

00:09:46.020 | a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter.

00:09:47.980 | I mean, it's all just totally nuts.

00:09:49.940 | Or you had to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside.

00:09:53.500 | And I thought, "Well, this isn't gonna work."

00:09:55.340 | And one of my great uncles who had fought in World War II

00:09:57.900 | said, "Well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona.

00:09:59.980 | Why don't you go and study Russian?

00:10:01.340 | Try to figure it out.

00:10:02.300 | Figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up."

00:10:04.820 | Because during the- - Go talk to them.

00:10:06.300 | - Exactly, during World War II,

00:10:08.500 | the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union

00:10:10.820 | had all been wartime allies.

00:10:11.940 | And my uncle Charlie thought,

00:10:13.540 | "Well, there's something gone wrong here.

00:10:15.100 | Maybe you can figure it out."

00:10:16.380 | And as you said, "Go talk to them."

00:10:18.380 | So I thought, "Okay, I'll study Russian."

00:10:20.620 | So that's really how this came about.

00:10:22.740 | I thought, "Well, it's applying education.

00:10:24.820 | I'll just do my very best to understand

00:10:26.500 | everything I possibly can about the Russian language

00:10:29.060 | and the Soviet Union, and I'll see what I can do."

00:10:31.540 | And I thought, "Well, maybe I could become a translator."

00:10:33.660 | So I had visions of myself sitting around,

00:10:35.820 | you know, listening to things in a big headset

00:10:38.620 | and in a best way translating perhaps

00:10:40.260 | at some future arms control summits.

00:10:43.700 | - So how did the journey continue with learning Russian?

00:10:48.700 | I mean, this early dream of being a translator

00:10:54.380 | and thinking, "How can I actually help understand

00:10:58.100 | or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict

00:11:01.740 | that threatens the existence of the human species?"

00:11:04.340 | How did it actually continue?

00:11:07.540 | - Well, I mean, I read everything I possibly could

00:11:09.700 | about nuclear weapons and nuclear war,

00:11:11.740 | and I started to try to teach myself Russian a little bit.

00:11:15.260 | - So it was always in context of nuclear war?

00:11:17.340 | - It was very much in the context of nuclear war

00:11:19.180 | at this particular point, but also in historical context,

00:11:22.220 | because I knew that the United States

00:11:23.780 | and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union

00:11:25.900 | had been wartime allies in World War II,

00:11:27.300 | so I tried to understand all of that.

00:11:29.300 | And also, you know, like many other people,

00:11:32.540 | I'd read Russian literature in translation.

00:11:35.140 | I'd read "War and Peace," and I loved the book, actually.

00:11:37.940 | I mean, particularly the story parts of it.

00:11:40.300 | I wasn't one really at that time when I was a teenager.

00:11:43.460 | I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, you know,

00:11:45.340 | in terms of his series of "The Great Man"

00:11:47.580 | and of history and, you know, kind of social change,

00:11:50.140 | although now I appreciate it more.

00:11:51.380 | But when I was about 14, I was like,

00:11:52.940 | "This man needed an editor.

00:11:54.740 | Could he have just gone on with the story?

00:11:56.020 | What an amazing story, what an incredible,

00:11:57.940 | you know, kind of book this is."

00:11:59.260 | - I still think he needs an editor, but...

00:12:01.580 | - Well, I think his wife tried, didn't she?

00:12:02.980 | But he got quite upset with her.

00:12:05.620 | And then I kind of thought to myself,

00:12:06.700 | "Well, how do I study Russian?"

00:12:08.500 | Because there were very few schools in my region,

00:12:11.540 | you know, given the impoverishment of the region

00:12:13.980 | where you could study Russian,

00:12:15.020 | so I would have to take Russian from scratch.

00:12:18.060 | And this is where things get really quite interesting,

00:12:20.860 | because there were opportunities

00:12:23.460 | to study Russian at universities,

00:12:25.940 | but I would need to have, first of all,

00:12:28.740 | an intensive Russian language course in the summer,

00:12:31.460 | and I didn't have the money for that.

00:12:33.700 | And the period is around the miners' strike

00:12:36.500 | in the United Kingdom in 1984.

00:12:38.780 | Now, the miners of County Durham

00:12:43.660 | had very interestingly had exchanges and ties

00:12:46.700 | with the miners of Donbass going back to the 1920s.

00:12:51.140 | And as I studied Russian history,

00:12:52.620 | I discovered there was lots of contacts

00:12:54.740 | between Bolshevik, Soviet Union,

00:12:57.540 | the early period after the Russian Revolution,

00:12:59.180 | but even before that,

00:13:00.620 | during the imperial period in Russia

00:13:02.180 | between the Northern England and the Russian Empire

00:13:05.260 | and the old industrial areas.

00:13:06.940 | Basically, big industrial areas

00:13:08.420 | like the Northeast of England and places like Donbass

00:13:11.260 | were built up at the same time,

00:13:12.380 | often by the same sets of industrialists.

00:13:15.380 | And Donetsk in the Donbass region

00:13:18.500 | used to be called Husevka,

00:13:20.460 | because it was established by a Welsh industrialist

00:13:23.820 | who brought in miners from Wales

00:13:26.020 | to help kind of develop the coal mines there,

00:13:28.740 | and also the steelworks and others

00:13:30.660 | that we're hearing about all the time.

00:13:33.300 | So I got very fascinated in all these linkages.

00:13:35.260 | And famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union

00:13:38.420 | like Yevgeny Zamyatin worked in the shipyards

00:13:41.420 | in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,

00:13:44.060 | and there was just this whole set of connections.

00:13:48.060 | And in 1984, when the miners' strike took place,

00:13:53.300 | the miners of Donbass, along with other miners

00:13:55.420 | from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley,

00:13:58.740 | for example, in Germany, or miners in Poland,

00:14:01.780 | sent money in solidarity to the miners of Kandy-Durham.

00:14:05.860 | And there'd been these exchanges, as I said,

00:14:07.180 | going back and forth since the 1920s,

00:14:09.460 | formal exchanges between miners,

00:14:11.660 | the regional miners' unions.

00:14:13.100 | And I heard, again, from the same great-uncle

00:14:18.980 | who had told me to study Russian,

00:14:21.580 | that there were actually scholarships

00:14:22.900 | for the children of miners,

00:14:24.020 | and it could be former miners as well, for their education.

00:14:27.500 | And I should go along to the miners' hall,

00:14:30.580 | a place called Red Hills,

00:14:32.420 | where the miners of Kandy-Durham

00:14:34.100 | had actually pooled all of their resources

00:14:36.260 | and built up their own parliament,

00:14:38.020 | and their own place that they could talk among themselves

00:14:41.420 | to figure out how to enhance the welfare

00:14:44.140 | and wellbeing of their communities.

00:14:46.220 | And they'd put money aside for education for miners.

00:14:48.500 | There was all kinds of lecture series from the miners

00:14:50.540 | and all kinds of other activities supporting soccer teams

00:14:53.820 | and artistic circles and writing circles, for example.

00:14:57.380 | People like George Orwell were involved

00:14:59.460 | in some of these writers' circles

00:15:01.140 | in other parts of Britain and mining communities, for example.

00:15:05.100 | And so they told me I could go along

00:15:08.380 | and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian.

00:15:11.660 | So I show up, and it was the easiest application

00:15:14.980 | I've ever come across.

00:15:15.820 | They just asked me to, my dad came along with me.

00:15:18.700 | They asked me to verify that my dad had been a miner,

00:15:22.300 | and they looked up his employment record on little cards,

00:15:25.100 | you know, kind of a little tray somewhere.

00:15:27.780 | And then they asked me how much I needed

00:15:30.140 | to basically pay for the travel

00:15:33.420 | and some of the basic expenses for the study,

00:15:37.740 | and they wrote me a cheque.

00:15:39.300 | And so thanks to the miners of Donbass

00:15:41.820 | and this money that was deposited

00:15:43.460 | with the miners of Kandy-Durham

00:15:45.220 | with the Durham Miners' Association,

00:15:47.020 | I got the money to study Russian for the first time

00:15:50.620 | before I embarked on my studies at university.

00:15:53.780 | - As you're speaking now, it's reminding me

00:15:56.100 | that there's a different way to look

00:15:58.100 | both at history and at geography and at different places.

00:16:02.380 | You know, this is an industrial region.

00:16:06.860 | - That's right. - And it echoes,

00:16:08.180 | and the experience of living there is more captured

00:16:13.420 | not by Moscow or Kiev, but by, at least historically,

00:16:18.420 | but by just being a mining town and industrial town.

00:16:21.900 | - That's right, in the place itself.

00:16:23.700 | - Yeah. - Yeah, I mean,

00:16:24.540 | there are places in the United States,

00:16:25.820 | in Appalachia, in West Virginia, and in Pennsylvania,

00:16:28.340 | like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place.

00:16:31.860 | And the northeast of England, you know,

00:16:33.540 | was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

00:16:36.420 | It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley,

00:16:39.380 | which has its own, I would say, contours and frames.

00:16:43.860 | And when you come to those industrial areas,

00:16:46.420 | your previous identities get submerged

00:16:48.700 | in that larger framework.

00:16:50.700 | I've always looked at the world through that lens

00:16:53.460 | of being, you know, someone from the working class,

00:16:55.900 | the blue-collar communities, from a very specific place

00:16:58.780 | with lots of historical and economic connotations.

00:17:02.940 | And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems

00:17:06.340 | that the Donbassers experienced over the last 30 years.

00:17:10.540 | That people came from all over the place to work there.

00:17:12.300 | Of course, it was a population

00:17:13.980 | that one might say is indigenous, you know,

00:17:15.500 | might've gone back centuries there,

00:17:17.220 | but they would have been, you know,

00:17:18.380 | in the smaller rural farming communities,

00:17:20.300 | just like it was the same in the northeast of England.

00:17:23.100 | And people, in the case of the northeast of England,

00:17:25.700 | came from Wales, they came from further

00:17:27.340 | in the south of England, the Midlands,

00:17:28.780 | they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland.

00:17:31.740 | I have all of that heritage in my own personal background.

00:17:35.900 | And you've got a different identity.

00:17:38.540 | And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity

00:17:41.740 | on you from the outside that things go awry.

00:17:44.020 | And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen

00:17:46.420 | in the case of Donbass.

00:17:48.340 | It's a place that's a part in many respects,

00:17:50.340 | historically, and in terms of its evolution

00:17:53.340 | and development over time.

00:17:55.060 | And, you know, particularly in the case of Russia,

00:17:58.180 | the Russians have tried to say, "Well, look," you know,

00:18:00.020 | because most people speak Russian there,

00:18:01.340 | is the lingua franca.

00:18:02.580 | I mean, in the northeast of England,

00:18:03.700 | of course, everyone spoke English,

00:18:04.700 | but lots of people were Irish speakers,

00:18:06.740 | you know, Gaelic-Irish speakers,

00:18:07.900 | or, you know, some of them might have

00:18:10.180 | certainly been Welsh speakers.

00:18:11.340 | There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh

00:18:13.260 | as their first language who came there,

00:18:14.980 | you know, but they created an identity.

00:18:17.260 | It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster,

00:18:19.420 | you know, the northern province of the, you know,

00:18:22.660 | the whole of the Irish island,

00:18:24.740 | you know, the part of Ireland

00:18:26.540 | that is still part of the United Kingdom.

00:18:28.460 | That was also a heavily industrialized area,

00:18:31.820 | high manufacturing, mass manufacturing,

00:18:35.460 | shipbuilding, for example.

00:18:36.700 | People came from all over there, too,

00:18:38.620 | which is why when Ireland got its independence

00:18:41.940 | in the United Kingdom, Ulster, Belfast,

00:18:45.260 | and that whole region, you know, kind of clung on

00:18:47.780 | because it was, again, that melting pot.

00:18:49.740 | It was kind of intertwined with the larger

00:18:52.660 | industrial economy and had a very different identity.

00:18:56.340 | And so that, you know, for me,

00:18:57.820 | growing up in such a specific place

00:19:00.220 | with such a special, in many respects, heritage

00:19:05.220 | gave me a different perspective on things.

00:19:06.940 | When I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987

00:19:10.260 | to study there, I actually went to a translators' institute,

00:19:12.780 | what was then called the Maurice Therese,

00:19:14.340 | which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages.

00:19:16.980 | I was immediately struck by how similar

00:19:20.940 | everything was to the north of England

00:19:23.180 | because it was just like one big working-class culture

00:19:25.460 | that had sort of broken out onto the national stage.

00:19:27.900 | Everything in northern England was nationalized.

00:19:30.860 | We had British steel, British coal,

00:19:32.620 | British rail, British shipbuilding,

00:19:34.500 | because after World War II,

00:19:35.660 | the private sector had been devastated

00:19:37.900 | and the state had to step in.

00:19:39.860 | And of course, the Soviet Union is one great big,

00:19:41.780 | giant, nationalized economy when I get there.

00:19:44.740 | And it's just, the people's attitudes

00:19:46.740 | and outlooks are the same.

00:19:47.580 | People didn't work for themselves.

00:19:48.900 | They always worked for somebody else.

00:19:50.860 | And it had quite a distortion on the way

00:19:53.660 | that people looked at the world.

00:19:54.980 | - Do you still speak Russian?

00:19:56.300 | - I do, yeah.

00:19:57.140 | - You speak Russian?

00:19:57.980 | - Yeah, I can, of course, if you want.

00:20:00.100 | - Well, then I need to say something

00:20:03.100 | and everyone will think about what we're talking about.

00:20:05.260 | - Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody.

00:20:07.140 | You have an advantage on me

00:20:08.140 | because it's your native language as well.

00:20:09.420 | - For people wondering, the English speakers in the audience,

00:20:12.460 | you're really missing a lot

00:20:13.620 | from the few sentences we said there.

00:20:15.620 | Yeah, it's a fascinating language

00:20:18.900 | that stretches actually geographically

00:20:21.060 | across a very large part of this world.

00:20:23.300 | So there you are in 1987,

00:20:25.900 | an exchange student in the Soviet Union.

00:20:28.100 | What was that world like?

00:20:30.260 | - Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period

00:20:33.700 | because it's the period that's just around the time

00:20:37.340 | of the peak of Perestroika,

00:20:38.860 | Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president.

00:20:43.340 | Well, he wasn't quite president at that point.

00:20:44.660 | He was Secretary General of the Communist Party

00:20:47.380 | of the Soviet Union,

00:20:48.220 | trying to transform the whole place.

00:20:50.180 | So I arrived there in September of 1987,

00:20:54.700 | just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty.

00:20:59.700 | It was just within weeks of them about to sign that,

00:21:02.660 | which really ends that whole period

00:21:04.420 | that had shaped my entire teenage years

00:21:07.420 | of the end of the Euromissile Crisis

00:21:09.260 | by finally having agreement on basically the reduction

00:21:12.860 | and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces.

00:21:16.020 | And also at this point,

00:21:17.380 | Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up.

00:21:20.980 | So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel

00:21:23.180 | in ways that we wouldn't have done before.

00:21:25.620 | Not just in Moscow,

00:21:27.100 | which is where I was studying at the translational institute,

00:21:28.940 | but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia,

00:21:31.020 | went all the way to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East,

00:21:34.940 | all the way around Moscow.

00:21:37.100 | And at this point, it was also the Kreseniya Rus',

00:21:41.660 | which has become very important now.

00:21:43.060 | This was the anniversary,

00:21:44.500 | the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia,

00:21:49.500 | which of course has become a massive obsession

00:21:52.580 | of Vladimir Putin's, but you know, 988,

00:21:55.980 | 'cause I was there '87 to '88.

00:21:58.220 | At this point, the Russian Orthodox Church

00:22:00.380 | is undergoing a revival

00:22:01.620 | from being repressed during the Soviet period.

00:22:03.980 | You certainly have the church stepping out

00:22:06.180 | as a non-governmental organization

00:22:08.260 | and engaging in discussions with people

00:22:10.420 | about the future of religion.

00:22:11.860 | So that was something that I wasn't expecting to witness.

00:22:17.820 | Also, I mean, being in Moscow,

00:22:20.180 | this is the cultural capital of a vast empire at this point.

00:22:23.780 | I'd never lived in a major city before.

00:22:25.340 | It's the first big city I lived in.

00:22:27.180 | I'd never been to the opera.

00:22:28.580 | You know, the first time I got an opera,

00:22:31.300 | it's at the Bolshoi, and I'd never seen a ballet.

00:22:33.740 | I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture.

00:22:37.100 | When you're kind of growing up in a mining region,

00:22:39.900 | you know, there's very limited opportunities

00:22:41.900 | for this kind of thing.

00:22:42.740 | I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir.

00:22:44.820 | My parents signed me up for absolutely everything,

00:22:46.300 | you know, they possibly could education-wise,

00:22:48.460 | but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this.

00:22:50.740 | So, you know, I was kind of astounded

00:22:52.620 | by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience

00:22:55.540 | that one could have in Moscow.

00:22:56.420 | But the main thing was I was really struck

00:22:58.460 | by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs.

00:23:02.660 | Because this was Moscow, you know,

00:23:04.260 | I got this image about what it would look like.

00:23:06.500 | I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first

00:23:09.220 | about what I would see there,

00:23:10.420 | if not the big nuclear superpower.

00:23:11.980 | And as soon as I got there,

00:23:13.300 | it was just this like as if a huge weight

00:23:15.060 | that I'd been carrying around for years

00:23:16.700 | in my teenage years just disappeared

00:23:18.100 | because it's just ordinary people

00:23:19.260 | in an ordinary place, not doing great.

00:23:21.740 | This is the period of, you know,

00:23:24.060 | what they call "deficitnei vremye,"

00:23:25.860 | you know, so the period of deficits.

00:23:27.420 | But there was no food in the shops.

00:23:29.100 | There was, you know, very little in terms of commodities

00:23:31.500 | because the supply and demand parts

00:23:35.180 | of the economic equation were out of whack

00:23:36.780 | because this was total central planning.

00:23:38.460 | You know, you'd go into, you know,

00:23:40.100 | a shop that was supposed to sell boots

00:23:41.940 | and there'd be just one pair of boots

00:23:44.700 | all in the same size and the same color.

00:23:47.020 | I actually lucked out because once I was

00:23:48.820 | in this Hungarian boot shop that was right next

00:23:52.300 | to where my hall of residence was

00:23:54.340 | and I was looking for a new pair of boots

00:23:55.580 | and every single pair of boots in the shop were my size.

00:23:58.460 | And they were all women's boots.

00:23:59.300 | There were no men's boots at all, you know,

00:24:01.140 | 'cause there was been an oversupply of boots

00:24:02.940 | and that size production.

00:24:04.540 | But you could really kind of see here

00:24:05.820 | that there was something wrong.

00:24:06.820 | And, you know, in the north of England,

00:24:08.060 | everything was closed down.

00:24:08.980 | The shops were shuttered because there was no demand

00:24:11.460 | because everybody lost their jobs.

00:24:12.700 | It was massive employment.

00:24:14.100 | You know, when I went off to university in 1984,

00:24:16.620 | 90% youth unemployment in the UK,

00:24:19.380 | meaning that when kids left school,

00:24:21.300 | they didn't have something else to go on to

00:24:22.660 | unless they got to university

00:24:23.860 | or vocational training or an apprenticeship.

00:24:25.980 | And most people were still looking, you know,

00:24:27.860 | kind of months out of leaving school.

00:24:30.740 | And so shops were closing

00:24:31.900 | 'cause people didn't have any money.

00:24:33.380 | You know, I had 50% male unemployment in some of the towns

00:24:36.700 | as the steel works closed down

00:24:38.780 | and the wagon works, the railways, for example, in my area.

00:24:42.820 | But in Moscow, people in theory did have money,

00:24:45.220 | but there was just, there was nothing to buy.

00:24:47.220 | Those are the place was falling apart, literally.

00:24:49.380 | I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street,

00:24:51.980 | balconies fall off buildings,

00:24:53.500 | you know, one accident after another.

00:24:55.780 | And then there was, you know, this real kind of sense,

00:24:57.740 | even though the vibrancy and excitement

00:24:59.820 | and hope of the Gorbachev period,

00:25:01.620 | a real sense of the Soviet Union had lost its way.

00:25:04.980 | And of course it was only a year or so

00:25:07.140 | after I left from that exchange program

00:25:10.060 | and I'd already started with my degree program

00:25:13.140 | in Soviet studies at Harvard,

00:25:15.540 | that the Soviet Union basically unraveled.

00:25:18.260 | And it really did unravel.

00:25:19.380 | It wasn't like it collapsed.

00:25:21.060 | It was basically that there was so many debates

00:25:23.460 | that Gorbachev had sparked off

00:25:25.060 | about how to reform the country,

00:25:26.540 | how to put it on a different path,

00:25:28.540 | that, you know, no one was in agreement.

00:25:30.380 | And it was basically all these fights

00:25:31.780 | and debates and disputes among the elites at the center,

00:25:36.660 | as well as, you know, basically a loss of faith

00:25:39.340 | in the system in the periphery

00:25:41.340 | and among the general population

00:25:43.380 | that in fact pulled it apart.

00:25:44.860 | And of course, in 1991,

00:25:47.620 | you get Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian Federation,

00:25:53.380 | then a constituent part of the Soviet Union,

00:25:55.740 | together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus,

00:25:59.260 | all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union

00:26:03.220 | getting together and agreeing and essentially ending it.

00:26:06.020 | And Gorbachev, you know, so basically I'm there

00:26:07.700 | at the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation

00:26:10.740 | and thinking about the future.

00:26:12.260 | And within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone

00:26:13.980 | and it's on a different track entirely.

00:26:16.060 | - Well, I wonder if we reran the 20th century a thousand times

00:26:21.060 | if how many times the Soviet Union would collapse.

00:26:24.220 | - Yeah, I wonder about that too.

00:26:26.300 | And I also wonder about what would have happened

00:26:27.740 | if it didn't collapse

00:26:28.820 | and Gorbachev had found a different direction.

00:26:31.460 | - I mean, you know, we see a very divisive time now

00:26:34.300 | in American history.

00:26:36.220 | The United States of America has very different cultures,

00:26:39.820 | very different beliefs, ideologies within those states,

00:26:43.780 | but that's kind of the strength of America

00:26:46.580 | is there's these little laboratories of ideas.

00:26:50.180 | - Until though, that they don't keep together.

00:26:51.940 | I mean, I've had colleagues who have described

00:26:53.740 | what's happening in the West right now

00:26:54.820 | was a kind of soft secession with states, you know,

00:26:57.540 | going off in their own direction.

00:26:59.420 | - In which states?

00:27:01.900 | - Well, these kinds of conceptions that we have now,

00:27:04.740 | divisions between red and blue states

00:27:06.780 | because of the fracturing of our politics.

00:27:09.740 | And I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible

00:27:11.580 | in somewhere like the United States

00:27:13.020 | or many other countries as well,

00:27:15.340 | because there wasn't that ethnic dimension.

00:27:18.860 | But in fact, many of the way that people talk about politics

00:27:22.380 | has given it that kind of appearance in many respects.

00:27:25.420 | 'Cause look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union

00:27:27.980 | and the Soviet period,

00:27:29.540 | and from where you're from, you know, originally in Ukraine,

00:27:31.820 | that language is not the main signifier of identity

00:27:35.860 | and that identity can take all kinds of other forms.

00:27:39.780 | - That's really interesting.

00:27:40.780 | I mean, but there has to be a deep grievance of some kind.

00:27:45.020 | If you took a poll in any of the states in the United States,

00:27:48.580 | I think a very small minority of people

00:27:51.020 | would want to actually secede,

00:27:53.220 | even in Texas where I spend a lot of my time.

00:27:56.380 | I just, I think that there is a common

00:27:59.700 | kind of pride of nation.

00:28:02.900 | You know, there's a lot of people complain

00:28:05.740 | about government and about how the country's going,

00:28:09.780 | the way people complain about the weather when it's raining.

00:28:12.260 | They say, "Oh, this stupid weather, it's raining again."

00:28:15.140 | But really what they mean is we're in the smock together.

00:28:19.660 | There's a together there.

00:28:21.820 | - I also feel that when I go around,

00:28:23.780 | 'cause I mean, I've spent a lot of time

00:28:25.100 | since I wrote my book in last October,

00:28:28.220 | and this last year going around, I find the same feeling.

00:28:31.260 | But you know, when I traveled around the Soviet Union,

00:28:34.140 | back in the late 1980s,

00:28:35.900 | I didn't get any kind of sense that people wanted

00:28:38.100 | to see the end of the Soviet Union either.

00:28:40.300 | It was an elite project.

00:28:42.220 | There's a really great book called "Collapse"

00:28:45.060 | by Vladislav Zubok, who is a professor

00:28:47.940 | at London School of Economics at LSE.

00:28:53.940 | And Zubok is pretty much my age,

00:28:55.820 | and he's from the former Soviet Union, he's Russian.

00:28:58.580 | And I mean, he describes it very quite aptly

00:29:00.820 | about how it was kind of the elites,

00:29:03.060 | you know, that basically decided

00:29:04.740 | to pull the Soviet Union apart.

00:29:06.100 | And there is a risk of that here as well,

00:29:07.820 | when you get partisan politics

00:29:09.620 | and people forgetting that they're Americans,

00:29:11.980 | and they are all in this together,

00:29:13.140 | like a lot of the population thing.

00:29:14.740 | But they think that their own narrow partisan

00:29:17.020 | or ideological precepts account for more.

00:29:21.180 | And in the Soviet case, of course,

00:29:22.020 | it was also a power play,

00:29:23.540 | in a way that actually can't quite play out

00:29:27.420 | in the United States,

00:29:28.340 | because it was the equivalent of governors in many respects

00:29:31.860 | who got together three of them,

00:29:33.340 | you know, in the case of the heads of Russia,

00:29:37.060 | Ukraine, and Belarus,

00:29:38.340 | who then got rid of basically

00:29:41.100 | the central figure of Mikhail Gorbachev.

00:29:44.980 | It would be a little difficult to do that.

00:29:46.860 | The dynamic is not the same,

00:29:48.140 | but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up

00:29:52.500 | in the late 1980s and the early '90s.

00:29:55.940 | I spent a lot of time in Russia,

00:30:00.220 | as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus Central Asia

00:30:02.740 | and other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

00:30:05.900 | But you kind of see the same elite divisions here

00:30:09.860 | in the United States pulling in different directions

00:30:14.380 | and straining the overall body politic.

00:30:16.740 | And the way that national politics gets imposed

00:30:20.700 | on local politics,

00:30:22.420 | in ways that it certainly wasn't

00:30:23.580 | when I first came to the US in 1989.

00:30:25.580 | I didn't honestly, in 1989, when I first came here,

00:30:28.020 | I didn't know anybody's political affiliation.

00:30:30.140 | I mean, I rarely knew their religious affiliation.

00:30:32.660 | And, you know, obviously race was a major phenomenon here

00:30:36.100 | that was a shock to me when I first came.

00:30:38.820 | But many of the kind of the class, regional, geographic,

00:30:42.820 | you know, kind of political dimensions

00:30:44.460 | that I've seen in other places,

00:30:45.740 | I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now.

00:30:49.740 | - And you take a lot of pride

00:30:52.500 | to this day of being non-partisan.

00:30:54.580 | That said, so you served

00:31:00.140 | for the George W. Bush, Barack Obama,

00:31:02.660 | and Donald Trump administrations,

00:31:05.420 | always specializing in Eurasia and Russia.

00:31:10.420 | You were the top presidential advisor to President,

00:31:14.700 | former President Donald Trump on Russia and Europe,

00:31:17.540 | and famously testified in his first impeachment trial

00:31:22.300 | in 2019, saying, "I take great pride

00:31:27.500 | in the fact that I'm non-partisan foreign policy expert."

00:31:31.340 | So given that context, what does non-partisan mean to you?

00:31:35.460 | - Well, it means being very careful

00:31:37.620 | about not putting any kind of ideological lens

00:31:39.820 | on anything, you know, that I'm analyzing

00:31:42.100 | or looking out or saying about foreign policy, for one thing,

00:31:45.220 | but also not taking, you know,

00:31:46.420 | kind of one stance of one party over another either.

00:31:49.460 | To be honest, I've always found American politics

00:31:53.100 | somewhat confounding because both the Democratic

00:31:55.980 | and the Republican Party are pretty big tents.

00:31:57.940 | I mean, they're coalitions.

00:31:59.540 | You know, in Europe, it's actually kind of,

00:32:01.740 | in some respects, easier to navigate

00:32:03.860 | the parameters of political parties

00:32:05.500 | because you have quite clear platforms.

00:32:07.860 | There's also a longer history in many respects, obviously.

00:32:10.900 | I mean, there's a long history here in the United States

00:32:12.620 | of the development of the parties,

00:32:13.980 | going back to the late 18th century.

00:32:16.460 | But in the United Kingdom, for example,

00:32:18.700 | in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties,

00:32:20.900 | it was quite easy to get a handle on.

00:32:23.380 | You know, at one point in the UK, for example,

00:32:26.220 | the parties were real, genuine mass parties

00:32:28.220 | with people who were properly members

00:32:29.660 | and took part in regular meetings and paid dues.

00:32:32.260 | And, you know, it was easy to kind of see

00:32:34.100 | what they stood for.

00:32:35.220 | And the same in Europe, you know,

00:32:36.540 | when you look at France and in Germany

00:32:38.220 | and Western Germany, of course, Italy and elsewhere.

00:32:42.140 | Here in the United States, it's kind of pretty amorphous.

00:32:44.900 | You know, the fact that you could kind of register,

00:32:46.780 | you know, randomly, it seems to be a Democrat or Republican,

00:32:49.540 | like Trump did.

00:32:50.740 | At one point, he's a Democrat.

00:32:51.740 | Next thing, he's a Republican.

00:32:53.020 | And then you kind of usurp a party apparatus.

00:32:55.420 | But you don't have to be, you're not vetted in any way.

00:32:57.660 | You're not kind of, you know,

00:32:59.540 | they don't check you out to see

00:33:00.700 | if you have ideological coherence.

00:33:02.940 | You know, you could have someone like Bernie Sanders

00:33:04.660 | on the other side, on the left,

00:33:06.340 | you know, basically calling himself a socialist

00:33:08.660 | and running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

00:33:13.300 | So, you know, kind of in many respects,

00:33:14.980 | parties in the United States are much more loose movements.

00:33:18.900 | And I think you can, you know,

00:33:19.820 | it's almost like a kind of an a la carte menu

00:33:21.860 | of different things that people can pick out.

00:33:26.220 | And it's more over time, as I've noticed,

00:33:29.820 | become more like a kind of an affiliation

00:33:32.180 | even with the sporting team.

00:33:33.700 | I mean, I get very shocked by the way that people say,

00:33:35.740 | well, I couldn't do this because, you know,

00:33:37.260 | that's my side and I couldn't do anything

00:33:39.500 | and I couldn't support someone for the other side.

00:33:41.300 | I mean, I have a relative in my extended family here

00:33:45.740 | who is a, you know, died in the war Republican

00:33:49.580 | and on, you know, family holiday,

00:33:52.580 | there was a book on their table,

00:33:54.180 | said a hundred reasons for voting for a Democrat.

00:33:56.620 | And I said, hey, are you thinking

00:33:58.140 | of shifting party affiliation?

00:33:59.500 | Then I opened the book and it's blank.

00:34:01.140 | It was pretty funny.

00:34:01.980 | I had to laugh.

00:34:03.300 | I thought, well, there you go then.

00:34:04.900 | You know, there's just, there's no way that, you know,

00:34:06.420 | people can pull themselves out of these frames.

00:34:08.580 | So for me, it's very important

00:34:09.940 | to have that independence of thought.

00:34:12.420 | I think you can be politically engaged on the issues,

00:34:15.820 | but, you know, basically without taking a stance

00:34:19.380 | that's defined by some ideology

00:34:22.820 | or some sense of kind of parties on affiliation.

00:34:25.940 | - I think I tweeted about this, maybe not eloquently.

00:34:29.220 | And the statement, if I remember correctly,

00:34:31.420 | was something like, if you honestly can't find

00:34:36.420 | a good thing that Donald Trump did

00:34:38.540 | or a good thing that Joe Biden did,

00:34:41.340 | you're not thinking about ideas.

00:34:46.340 | You just pick the tribe.

00:34:48.500 | I mean, it was more eloquent than that,

00:34:49.740 | but it was basically, this is a really good test

00:34:54.140 | to see are you actually thinking

00:34:56.740 | about like how to solve problems

00:34:58.700 | versus like your red team or blue team,

00:35:01.300 | like a sporting team.

00:35:02.740 | Can you find a good idea of Donald Trump's that you like,

00:35:07.740 | if you're somebody who is against Donald Trump

00:35:10.140 | and like acknowledge it to yourself privately?

00:35:13.020 | Oh, that's a good idea.

00:35:14.500 | I'm glad he said that.

00:35:15.820 | - Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions,

00:35:18.140 | which he often did actually.

00:35:19.180 | I mean, obviously he put them in a way

00:35:20.580 | that most of us wouldn't have done,

00:35:22.500 | but there was often kind of questions

00:35:23.700 | about why is this happening?

00:35:24.660 | Why are we doing this?

00:35:25.620 | And we have to challenge ourselves all the time.

00:35:27.940 | So yeah, actually, why are we doing that?

00:35:30.380 | And then you have to really inspect it

00:35:32.220 | and say whether it's actually worth continuing that way

00:35:34.540 | or they should be doing something differently.

00:35:36.340 | Now he had a more kind of destructive quality

00:35:38.500 | to those kinds of questions,

00:35:40.660 | about maybe it's the real estate developer in him

00:35:42.420 | that was taking a big wrecking ball

00:35:44.060 | to all of these kinds of sacred edifices

00:35:46.940 | and things like that.

00:35:47.780 | So often, if you really paid attention,

00:35:50.140 | he was asking a valid set of questions

00:35:52.180 | about why do we continue to do things like this?

00:35:54.020 | Now, he didn't often have answers

00:35:55.380 | about what he was gonna do in response,

00:35:57.340 | but those questions still had to be asked

00:35:59.660 | and we shouldn't be just rejecting them out of turn.

00:36:03.180 | - And another strength,

00:36:06.220 | the thing that people often,

00:36:07.980 | that criticize Donald Trump will say is a weakness

00:36:10.740 | is his lack of civility can be a strength

00:36:16.060 | because I feel like sometimes bureaucracy functions

00:36:18.820 | on excessive civility.

00:36:21.140 | Actually, I've seen this, it's not just,

00:36:24.180 | it's bureaucracy in all forms.

00:36:25.700 | In tech companies, as they grow,

00:36:29.980 | everybody kinda, you're getting a pretty good salary,

00:36:32.580 | everyone's comfortable and there's a meeting

00:36:36.740 | and you discuss how to move stuff forward.

00:36:40.620 | And you don't wanna be the asshole in the room

00:36:44.260 | that says, "Why are we doing this this way?

00:36:47.940 | "This could be unethical, this is hurting the world,

00:36:52.940 | "this is totally a dumb idea."

00:36:55.020 | Like, I mean, I could give specific examples

00:36:57.300 | that I have on my mind currently that are technical,

00:36:59.580 | but the point is oftentimes the person that's needed

00:37:02.540 | in that room is an asshole.

00:37:04.180 | - Yeah. - That's why Steve Jobs worked,

00:37:06.020 | that's why Elon Musk works, you have to roll in,

00:37:07.980 | that's what first principles thinking looks like.

00:37:09.900 | - The one bit when it doesn't work

00:37:11.020 | is when they start name-calling.

00:37:12.820 | - Sure. - Kind of inciting violence

00:37:14.220 | against the people that they disagree with.

00:37:15.860 | So that was kind of your problem,

00:37:16.980 | because I mean, often, when I was in the administration,

00:37:20.940 | I had all of Europe in my portfolio as well as Russia.

00:37:24.060 | And there were many times when we were dealing

00:37:26.660 | with our European colleagues

00:37:28.020 | where he was asking some pretty valid questions

00:37:31.220 | about, "Well, why should we do this if you're doing that?"

00:37:34.300 | For example, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,

00:37:36.900 | the United States has been opposed

00:37:38.460 | to Europe's reliance on gas and oil exports from Russia.

00:37:42.620 | You know, the Soviet Union since the '70s and '80s.

00:37:45.660 | And Trump kept pushing this idea about,

00:37:47.820 | "So why are we spending so much money on NATO

00:37:51.180 | and NATO defense, and we're all talking about this,

00:37:54.020 | if you're then basically paying billions to Russia for gas?

00:37:58.340 | Isn't this contradictory?"

00:37:59.900 | And of course it was, but it was the way that he did it.

00:38:02.580 | And I actually, one instance had a discussion

00:38:06.020 | with a European defense minister,

00:38:09.620 | basically said to me, "Look, he's saying exactly

00:38:11.700 | the same things as people said before him,

00:38:13.580 | including former Defense Secretary Gates.

00:38:16.060 | It's just the way he says it."

00:38:18.020 | You know, so they took offense.

00:38:19.100 | And then as a result of that, they wouldn't take action

00:38:20.860 | because they took offense at what he said.

00:38:22.900 | So it was a kind of then a way of,

00:38:24.700 | "Could you find some other means of,

00:38:27.580 | you know, massaging this communication

00:38:31.060 | to kind of make it effective?"

00:38:32.180 | Which we would always try to focus on.

00:38:34.620 | Because it's a kind of, it was the delivery.

00:38:37.700 | But the actual message was often spot on

00:38:41.500 | in those kinds of issues.

00:38:42.660 | I mean, he was actually highlighting,

00:38:44.580 | you know, these ridiculous discrepancies

00:38:46.380 | between what people said and what they actually did.

00:38:49.740 | - And it's the delivery, the charisma in the room too.

00:38:54.140 | I'm also understanding the power of that, of a leader.

00:38:57.380 | It's not just about what you do at a podium,

00:38:59.580 | but in a room with advisors, how you talk about stuff,

00:39:04.900 | how you convince other leaders.

00:39:06.580 | - Yeah, you don't do it through gratuitous insults

00:39:08.420 | and incitement to violence.

00:39:09.460 | That's one of the things you just,

00:39:10.860 | you don't get anywhere on that front.

00:39:11.900 | - Well, I mean, it's possible.

00:39:13.580 | - Tough measures and maximum pressure

00:39:16.180 | often though does work.

00:39:17.780 | Because there were, you know, often times where,

00:39:20.540 | you know, that kind of relentless,

00:39:22.980 | you know, nagging about something or constantly raising it

00:39:25.620 | actually did have results, but it hadn't previously.

00:39:28.420 | So there's, you know, the maximum pressure,

00:39:31.300 | if it, you know, kind of kept on it in the right way.

00:39:33.260 | And, you know, often when we were, you know,

00:39:35.020 | coming in behind on pushing on issues,

00:39:37.380 | you know, related to NATO or, you know,

00:39:39.580 | other things in this same sphere,

00:39:42.940 | it would actually have an effect.

00:39:45.260 | It just doesn't get talked about

00:39:46.500 | because it gets overshadowed by, you know,

00:39:49.500 | all of the other kind of stuff around this

00:39:51.620 | and the way that, you know,

00:39:53.100 | he interacted with people and treated people.

00:39:55.900 | - What was the heart, the key insights

00:39:59.500 | to your testimony in that impeachment?

00:40:01.420 | - Look, I think there is a straight line

00:40:05.460 | between that whole series of episodes

00:40:08.700 | and the current war in Ukraine.

00:40:10.820 | Because Vladimir Putin and the people around him

00:40:12.580 | in the Kremlin concluded that the US

00:40:15.580 | did not care one little bit about Ukraine

00:40:17.380 | and that it was just a game.

00:40:19.300 | For Trump, it was a personal game.

00:40:21.020 | He was basically trying to get Vladimir Zelensky

00:40:25.060 | to do him a personal favor related to his desire

00:40:28.180 | to stay on in power in the 2020 election.

00:40:32.460 | And generally, they just thought that we were using Ukraine

00:40:36.340 | as some kind of proxy or some kind of instrument

00:40:39.340 | within our own domestic politics

00:40:40.660 | 'cause that's what it looked like.

00:40:42.620 | And I think that, you know, as a result of that,

00:40:45.020 | Putin, you know, took the idea away

00:40:48.940 | that he could, you know, do whatever he wanted.

00:40:50.820 | We were constantly being asked, even prior to this,

00:40:53.300 | by people around Putin, like, you know,

00:40:58.300 | Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the National Security

00:41:02.020 | Council equivalent in Russia, who we met with frequently,

00:41:04.500 | "What's Ukraine to you? We don't get it.

00:41:06.140 | You know, why do you even care?"

00:41:07.900 | So they thought that we weren't serious.

00:41:09.340 | They thought that we weren't serious

00:41:10.260 | about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence

00:41:13.940 | or it is a national security player.

00:41:16.540 | And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate

00:41:19.780 | the political space in the United States.

00:41:21.580 | Actually, he could because what he was doing

00:41:23.980 | was seeding all this dissent and fueling, you know,

00:41:28.980 | already in a debate inside of US politics,

00:41:33.660 | the kinds of, you know, things that we see

00:41:35.060 | just kind of coming out now.

00:41:36.620 | This kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden,

00:41:39.020 | that Ukraine was, you know, basically just trying

00:41:41.300 | to extract things from the United States,

00:41:43.980 | that Ukraine had somehow played inside of US politics.

00:41:47.780 | Trump was convinced that the Ukrainians

00:41:49.620 | had done something against him,

00:41:50.620 | that they had intervened in the elections.

00:41:52.900 | And that was kind of, you know,

00:41:54.180 | a combination of people around him

00:41:56.260 | trying to find an excuse as to, you know,

00:41:58.300 | kind of what had happened in the election

00:42:00.380 | to kind of divert attention away

00:42:01.740 | from Russia's interference in 2016

00:42:04.460 | and the Russians themselves poisoning the well

00:42:06.980 | against Ukraine.

00:42:08.420 | So you had a kind of a confluence of circumstances there.

00:42:11.620 | And what I was trying to get across in that testimony

00:42:15.980 | was the national security imperative

00:42:17.820 | of basically getting our act together here

00:42:20.220 | and separating out what was going on

00:42:21.980 | in our domestic politics from what was happening

00:42:24.740 | in our national security and foreign policy.

00:42:27.460 | I mean, I think we contributed in that whole mess

00:42:31.420 | around the impeachment,

00:42:32.780 | but it's the whole parallel policies around Ukraine

00:42:36.900 | to the war that we now have that we're confronting.

00:42:40.500 | - Signaling the value we place in peace and stability

00:42:44.700 | in that part of the world,

00:42:45.660 | or the reverse by saying we don't care.

00:42:47.740 | - Yeah, we seem to not care.

00:42:48.780 | It was just a game.

00:42:49.620 | - But the US role in that war is a very complicated one.

00:42:54.620 | That's one of the variables.

00:42:58.900 | Just on that testimony,

00:43:02.260 | did it in part break your heart

00:43:05.580 | that you had to testify essentially

00:43:08.660 | against the president of the United States?

00:43:10.860 | Or is that not how you saw it?

00:43:13.300 | - I don't think I would describe it in that way.

00:43:18.540 | I think what I was was deeply disappointed

00:43:21.500 | by what I saw happening in the American political space.

00:43:27.980 | I didn't expect it.

00:43:29.580 | Look, I was a starry-eyed immigrant.

00:43:32.380 | I came to the United States with all of these expectations

00:43:35.420 | of what the place would be.

00:43:36.260 | I'd already been disabused of some of the,

00:43:39.500 | let's just say rosy perspectives

00:43:43.180 | I had of the United States.

00:43:44.220 | I'd been shocked by the depths of racial problems.

00:43:49.220 | It doesn't even sum up the problems

00:43:53.620 | we have in the United States.

00:43:54.660 | I mean, I couldn't get my head around it when I first came.

00:43:57.540 | I mean, I'd read about slavery in American history,

00:44:00.300 | but I hadn't fully fathomed really the kind of the way

00:44:03.340 | that it was ripping apart the United States.

00:44:05.500 | I mean, I'd read Alex's talk, Phil,

00:44:07.460 | and he'd commented on this,

00:44:08.380 | and it obviously hadn't kind of changed

00:44:10.460 | to the way that one would have expect all this time

00:44:13.260 | from the 18th century onwards.

00:44:15.420 | So that was kind of one thing

00:44:17.060 | that I realized the civil rights movement

00:44:19.900 | and all of these acts of expansion of suffrage

00:44:22.580 | and everything else were imperfect at best.

00:44:25.380 | I was born in '65, the same time as the Civil Rights Act,

00:44:28.380 | and there's a heck of a long way still to go.

00:44:29.700 | So I wasn't, let's just say,

00:44:31.940 | as starry-eyed about everything as I'd been before,

00:44:34.940 | but I really saw an incredible competence

00:44:37.300 | and professionalism in the US government,

00:44:39.620 | it was in the election system and the integrity of it.

00:44:43.020 | And I mean, I really saw that.

00:44:44.180 | I saw that the United States was the gold standard

00:44:46.500 | for kind of some of its institutions.

00:44:49.140 | And I worked in the National Intelligence Council,

00:44:50.860 | and I'd seen the way that the United States

00:44:52.340 | had tried to address the problems that it had faced

00:44:56.460 | in its whole botched analysis of Iraq

00:45:00.620 | and this terrible strategic blunder of,

00:45:03.020 | honestly, a crime in my view of invading Iraq,

00:45:07.380 | but the way that people were trying to deal with that

00:45:10.300 | in the aftermath.

00:45:11.140 | I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council

00:45:13.420 | and the DNI, the office of the Director

00:45:16.140 | of National Intelligence,

00:45:16.980 | when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong

00:45:19.380 | in the whole analysis about Iraq in 2003,

00:45:22.860 | in the whole wake of people trying to pull together

00:45:24.780 | after 9/11 and to learn all of the lessons from all of this.

00:45:28.180 | And I saw just really genuine striving and deliberation

00:45:31.740 | about what had gone wrong,

00:45:32.660 | what lessons could we learn from this?

00:45:34.740 | And then suddenly I found myself in this,

00:45:38.580 | I couldn't really describe it in any words,

00:45:39.740 | just totally crazy looking glass,

00:45:41.580 | thinking of Alice in Wonderland,

00:45:43.060 | Alice Through the Looking Glass version

00:45:45.380 | of American politics.

00:45:47.900 | I mean, I'd seen everything starting to unravel

00:45:50.140 | over a kind of a period of time

00:45:51.380 | before I'd been asked to be in the administration,

00:45:52.940 | but I did not expect it to be that bad, I honestly didn't.

00:45:56.300 | I mean, I'd been warned by people that this was

00:45:59.140 | really a very serious turn

00:46:03.060 | that the United States had taken,

00:46:04.220 | but I really thought that national security

00:46:06.660 | would still be uppermost in people's minds.

00:46:08.580 | And it was, I mean, a lot of the people that I work with,

00:46:11.140 | but what I found, if you want to use that term

00:46:14.860 | of heartbreaking, was the way in which

00:46:17.780 | all of these principles that I had really bought into

00:46:22.780 | and tried to uphold in the United States government

00:46:26.340 | and in the things that we were trying to do

00:46:28.100 | with me and my colleagues

00:46:28.940 | was just being thrown out the window.

00:46:31.260 | And that I would have to step up in defense of them

00:46:34.820 | and in defense of my colleagues

00:46:35.940 | who were being lambasted and criticized

00:46:38.340 | and given death threats for actually standing up

00:46:40.460 | and doing their own jobs.

00:46:41.780 | - In particular on the topic of Ukraine?

00:46:44.180 | - Not just on Ukraine, but on national security overall.

00:46:46.260 | So, I mean, I'd gone through this whole period

00:46:47.940 | even before we got to that point

00:46:50.340 | of seeing non-partisan government officials

00:46:53.380 | being attacked from all sides, left and right,

00:46:57.060 | but especially the right,

00:46:58.500 | and being basically accused of being partisan hacks,

00:47:01.620 | you know, deep state, coup plotters, you name it.

00:47:05.500 | There, patriotism being questioned as well.

00:47:09.820 | And a lot of people I work with in government,

00:47:11.460 | like myself, naturalized Americans,

00:47:12.980 | a lot of them were immigrants, many were refugees,

00:47:15.300 | and many people had fought in wars

00:47:18.140 | on behalf of the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan,

00:47:20.540 | being blown up.

00:47:21.380 | And, you know, they put their lives on the line.

00:47:24.900 | They put their family lives on the line, you know,

00:47:27.100 | because they believed in America.

00:47:28.660 | And they were just, they were reflections of Americans

00:47:31.260 | from all kinds of walks of life.

00:47:33.180 | It's what really made, you know,

00:47:34.860 | that cliche of America great.

00:47:36.300 | It wasn't, you know, whatever it was,

00:47:38.060 | it was being bandied around

00:47:39.340 | in these crude, crass political terms.

00:47:41.820 | It was just the strength of an incredible set of people

00:47:43.900 | who've come together from all kinds of places

00:47:45.940 | and decided that they're going to make a go of it,

00:47:48.900 | and that they're going to, you know,

00:47:50.340 | try to work towards the whole, you know,

00:47:52.580 | idea of the preamble of the Constitution

00:47:54.740 | towards a more perfect union.

00:47:56.100 | And I, you know, I saw people doing that every single day,

00:47:58.420 | despite all of the things that they could criticize

00:48:00.380 | about the United States,

00:48:01.300 | still believing in what they were doing

00:48:02.900 | and believing in the promise of the country,

00:48:04.140 | which is what I felt like.

00:48:05.340 | And then here we were,

00:48:06.660 | people were just treating it like a game,

00:48:09.060 | and they were treating people like dirt,

00:48:11.380 | and they were just playing games with people's lives.

00:48:13.300 | I mean, we all had death threats.

00:48:14.940 | You know, people's, you know, whole careers,

00:48:17.340 | which were not just careers for their own self-aggrandizement,

00:48:19.780 | but careers of public service,

00:48:21.780 | trying to give something back, were being shattered.

00:48:25.220 | And I found, you know, I just thought to myself,

00:48:26.980 | I'm not going to let that happen,

00:48:29.020 | because, you know, I've come from a,

00:48:30.740 | well, are they going to send me back

00:48:31.660 | to Bishop Auckland in County Durham?

00:48:33.180 | Fine, I'm totally fine to go back, you know,

00:48:35.540 | because I could do something back there,

00:48:37.020 | but I'm not going to let this happen.

00:48:38.420 | I've made this choice to come to America.

00:48:39.940 | I'm all in.

00:48:41.340 | And these guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots,

00:48:44.980 | and they're ruining it.

00:48:45.820 | You know, they're ruining it for everybody.

00:48:46.860 | - So the personal attacks on competent,

00:48:49.900 | hardworking, passionate people

00:48:51.620 | who have love for what they do in their heart,

00:48:54.620 | similar stuff I've seen for virologists and biologists,

00:48:59.020 | so colleagues, basically scientists,

00:49:01.340 | in the time of COVID when there's a bunch of cynicism,

00:49:04.420 | and there was just personal attacks,

00:49:06.540 | including death threats on people that, you know,

00:49:09.980 | work on viruses, work on vaccines.

00:49:11.540 | - Yeah, and they're going around in, you know,

00:49:13.460 | basically with protective gear on

00:49:16.060 | in case somebody shoots them in the street.

00:49:17.500 | That's just absurd.

00:49:19.220 | - But let me zoom out from the individual people.

00:49:23.780 | - Yeah.

00:49:24.780 | - And actually look at the situations that we saw

00:49:28.540 | in the George W. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump presidencies.

00:49:37.660 | And I'd like to sort of criticize each

00:49:41.180 | by not the treatment of individual people,

00:49:45.940 | but by the results.

00:49:47.340 | - Right, yeah, I think that's fair, yeah.

00:49:49.140 | - So if we look at George W. Bush,

00:49:51.220 | and maybe you can give me insights,

00:49:53.300 | this is what's fascinating to me.

00:49:54.860 | When you have extremely competent,

00:49:56.860 | smart, hardworking, well-intentioned people,

00:50:02.460 | how do we, as a system,

00:50:05.740 | make mistakes in foreign policy?

00:50:08.180 | So the big mistake you can characterize in different ways,

00:50:13.180 | but in George W. Bush is invading Iraq.

00:50:16.540 | - Yeah, that's key.

00:50:17.380 | - Or maybe how it was invaded,

00:50:18.980 | or maybe how the decision process was made to invade it.

00:50:23.380 | Again, Afghanistan, maybe not the invasion,

00:50:27.180 | but details around, like, having a plan

00:50:31.780 | about, you know, how to withdraw, all that kind of stuff.

00:50:34.740 | And Barack Obama, to me, similarly,

00:50:39.340 | is a man who came to fame early on

00:50:44.340 | for being somebody who was against,

00:50:46.580 | a rare voice against the invasion of Iraq,

00:50:49.540 | which was actually a brave thing to do at that time.

00:50:53.520 | And nevertheless, he, I mean, I don't know the numbers,

00:50:58.860 | but I think he was the president for years

00:51:02.780 | over increased drone attacks,

00:51:05.620 | everything from a foreign policy perspective,

00:51:10.680 | the military industrial complex,

00:51:14.780 | that machine grew in power under him, not shrunk,

00:51:19.520 | and did not withdraw from Afghanistan.

00:51:24.220 | And then with Donald Trump,

00:51:26.900 | the criticisms that you're presenting,

00:51:28.900 | sort of the personal attacks, the chaos,

00:51:33.500 | the partisanship of people

00:51:36.140 | that are supposed to be non-partisan.

00:51:38.140 | So that, you know, if you sort of to steel man the chaos,

00:51:42.980 | to make the case for chaos,

00:51:44.380 | maybe we need to shake up the machine,

00:51:47.340 | throw a wrench into the engine, into the gears.

00:51:51.660 | And then every individual gear

00:51:53.260 | is gonna be very upset with that, because it's a wrench.

00:51:56.140 | It's not, it's an inefficient process,

00:51:58.220 | but maybe it leads for government.

00:52:01.420 | It forces the system as a whole, not the individuals,

00:52:04.520 | but the system to reconsider how things are done.

00:52:07.840 | So obviously all of those things,

00:52:09.920 | the actual results are not that impressive.

00:52:14.100 | - You could have done that on the latter,

00:52:15.820 | you know, shaking things up,

00:52:16.740 | because I'm all one for questioning

00:52:18.300 | and trying to shake things up as well

00:52:19.460 | and do things differently.

00:52:21.220 | But, you know, the question is,

00:52:22.420 | if you bring the whole system down with nothing,

00:52:24.940 | ideas of putting it to place.

00:52:26.020 | Like, I mean, like many people,

00:52:27.540 | I've studied the Bolshevik Revolution

00:52:28.940 | and, you know, many others as well.

00:52:30.140 | And, you know, kind of what's, you know,

00:52:32.260 | what's the pattern here, you know,

00:52:33.840 | that actually fits into what you're talking about here

00:52:36.060 | is a kind of rigidity of thought

00:52:37.400 | on the part of revolutionaries in many cases as well.

00:52:39.740 | And also narcissism.

00:52:41.780 | In fact, I think that it takes a pretty, you know,

00:52:43.740 | strong sense of yourself, you know,

00:52:45.540 | kind of an own yourself

00:52:46.580 | to want to be president of the United States, for example.

00:52:48.860 | We see that in, you know,

00:52:50.100 | many of our presidents have been narcissists

00:52:51.820 | to different, you know, kind of degrees.

00:52:53.700 | You think about Lenin, you know, for example,

00:52:55.780 | and people can go back and read about Lenin.

00:52:58.380 | He formed his views when he was about 18

00:53:00.060 | and he never shook them off.

00:53:01.820 | He never evolved.

00:53:03.220 | He didn't have any kind of diversity of thought.

00:53:06.380 | And when systems go awry,

00:53:08.900 | it's when they don't bring in different perspectives.

00:53:12.060 | And so, you know, Trump,

00:53:13.560 | if he brought in different perspectives

00:53:14.660 | and actually listened to them

00:53:15.500 | and not just, you know,

00:53:16.320 | believed that he himself knew better than anyone else

00:53:18.300 | and then tried to divide everybody against each other,

00:53:20.340 | it would have been a different matter.

00:53:21.780 | It's a tragedy of a completely

00:53:23.180 | and utterly lost set of opportunities

00:53:24.740 | because of the flaws in his own nature.

00:53:28.300 | Because, I mean, again,

00:53:29.140 | there was all kinds of things

00:53:29.980 | that he could have done to shake things up.

00:53:31.380 | And so many people around him

00:53:32.940 | remained completely disappointed.

00:53:34.620 | And of course he divided

00:53:35.500 | and pitted people against each other,

00:53:37.260 | you know, creating so much factionalism

00:53:39.340 | in American politics that, you know,

00:53:40.820 | people have forgotten they're Americans.

00:53:42.060 | They think that they're red or blue,

00:53:43.780 | you know, parts of teams.

00:53:45.060 | And, you know, if you go back over history,

00:53:46.940 | that's kind of a recipe for war and, you know,

00:53:49.460 | internal conflict.

00:53:50.780 | You go back to, you know,

00:53:51.620 | the Byzantine Empire, for example,

00:53:53.260 | there's the famous episode of the Nike riots

00:53:56.220 | in Constantinople where the whole city gets trashed

00:54:01.620 | because the greens, the reds, the blues,

00:54:03.620 | and these various sporting teams in the Hippodrome

00:54:06.460 | get whipped up by political forces

00:54:08.420 | and they, you know, they pull the place apart.

00:54:10.020 | And that's, you know, kind of where we've been heading

00:54:11.900 | on some of these trajectories.

00:54:13.380 | But the other point is when you look back,

00:54:15.620 | you know, at Bush and Obama as well,

00:54:17.460 | there's a very narrow circle of decision-making.

00:54:20.020 | You know, at Bush period,

00:54:20.980 | it's the focus on the executive branch

00:54:23.700 | with Dick Cheney as the vice president

00:54:25.660 | being very fixated on it.

00:54:27.340 | And Obama, it's, you know, he and, you know,

00:54:29.340 | kind of the bright young things around him,

00:54:31.500 | you know, from, he himself is, you know,

00:54:33.820 | kind of intellectually, you know,

00:54:36.740 | one might say arrogant in many respects, you know,

00:54:39.460 | he was a very smart guy and, you know,

00:54:41.500 | he's convinced that he has,

00:54:43.180 | and he ruminates over a lot of things,

00:54:44.860 | but he's the person who makes, you know,

00:54:46.260 | a lot of decisions.

00:54:47.940 | And basically George W. Bush

00:54:50.740 | used to call himself the decider as well, right?

00:54:52.460 | I mean, they're all the people who make the decisions.

00:54:54.620 | It's not always as consultative as you might think it is.

00:54:57.460 | And for Trump, it's like,

00:54:58.380 | I'm not listening to anybody at all.

00:54:59.980 | You know, it's just me and whatever it is

00:55:01.460 | that I've woken up today and I've decided to do.

00:55:04.060 | So I think, you know, the problem with all of our systems

00:55:05.860 | and why we don't get results

00:55:06.940 | is because we don't draw upon, you know,

00:55:09.580 | the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of,

00:55:11.700 | you know, people out there.

00:55:12.540 | Like you do that in science.

00:55:14.580 | I mean, when, I mean,

00:55:15.420 | all of my friends and relatives are in science.

00:55:17.820 | They've got these incredible collaborations with people,

00:55:20.340 | you know, across the world.

00:55:21.300 | I mean, how did we get to these vaccines for the COVID virus?

00:55:24.420 | Because of this incredible years of collaboration

00:55:27.420 | and of, you know, sharing results and sharing ideas.

00:55:30.620 | And our whole system has become ossified.

00:55:34.060 | You know, we think about the congressional system,

00:55:35.980 | for example, as well.

00:55:36.820 | And there's, you know, this kind of rapid, you know,

00:55:38.820 | turnover that you have in Congress every two years.

00:55:41.620 | You know, there's no incentive for people,

00:55:43.180 | you know, basically to work with others.

00:55:45.180 | They're constantly campaigning.

00:55:46.660 | They're constantly trying to appeal to whatever their base is

00:55:48.900 | and they don't really care about, you know,

00:55:50.620 | some do, you know, of their constituents,

00:55:52.980 | but a lot of people don't.

00:55:54.220 | And the Senate, it's all kind of focused on the game

00:55:56.540 | of legislation for so many people as well.

00:56:00.820 | Not focusing again on that kind of sense about

00:56:03.620 | what are we doing like scientists to kind of work together,

00:56:06.100 | you know, for the good of the country to push things along.

00:56:08.380 | And also our government also is siloed.

00:56:11.660 | There's not a lot of mechanisms

00:56:13.700 | for bringing people together.

00:56:14.900 | There ought to be in things like

00:56:15.900 | the National Security Council,

00:56:17.540 | the National Intelligence Council actually did that

00:56:19.420 | quite successfully at times for analysis that I saw.

00:56:22.580 | But we don't have, you know,

00:56:24.100 | we have it within the National Institutes of Health,

00:56:26.020 | but we saw the CDC break down on this, you know,

00:56:28.500 | kind of front.

00:56:29.580 | We don't have sufficient to those institutions

00:56:32.220 | that bring people together

00:56:33.420 | from all kinds of different backgrounds.

00:56:35.460 | You know, one of the other problems that we've had

00:56:37.020 | with government, with the federal government

00:56:39.820 | over, you know, state and local government,

00:56:42.420 | is it's actually quite small.

00:56:43.780 | People think that the federal government's huge

00:56:46.020 | because we've got postal service and the military

00:56:47.980 | that are part of it,

00:56:48.820 | but your actual federal government employees

00:56:51.180 | is a very small number.

00:56:53.060 | And, you know, the senior executive service part of that

00:56:56.060 | is the older white guys, you know,

00:56:57.540 | who kind of come up all the way over the last,

00:56:59.620 | you know, several decades.

00:57:01.020 | We have a really hard time bringing in younger people

00:57:03.780 | into that kind of government service,

00:57:05.260 | unless they're political hacks, you know,

00:57:06.700 | and they want to, you know, kind of,

00:57:08.540 | or they're kind of looking for power

00:57:10.060 | and, you know, sort of influence.

00:57:11.780 | We have a hard time getting people like yourself

00:57:13.660 | and other, you know, younger people kind of coming in

00:57:16.580 | to make a career out of public service

00:57:18.900 | and also retaining them because, you know,

00:57:21.700 | people with incredible skills often get poached away

00:57:26.260 | into the private sector.

00:57:27.380 | And, you know, a lot of the people that I work with

00:57:29.020 | in the national security side are now at all kinds of,

00:57:32.580 | you know, high-end political consultancies,

00:57:36.060 | or they've gone to Silicon Valley

00:57:37.460 | and they've gone to this place and that place

00:57:40.340 | because after a time as a younger person,

00:57:42.380 | they're not rising up particularly quickly

00:57:44.460 | because there's a pretty rigid way of looking at

00:57:46.340 | the hierarchies and the promotion schemes.

00:57:49.420 | And they're also getting lambasted by everybody.

00:57:51.260 | People like, you know, public servants,

00:57:53.500 | they're not really public servants.

00:57:54.740 | There's this whole lack and loss

00:57:58.460 | of a kind of a faith in public service.

00:58:01.260 | And, you know, the last few years

00:58:02.540 | have really done a lot of damage.

00:58:04.260 | We need to revitalize our government system

00:58:07.940 | to get better results.

00:58:09.060 | We need to bring more people in,

00:58:10.180 | even if it's, you know, for a period of time,

00:58:11.580 | not just through expensive contracts

00:58:14.780 | for, you know, the big consulting companies

00:58:17.980 | and, you know, other entities

00:58:19.860 | that do government work out there,

00:58:21.300 | but getting people in for a period of time,

00:58:23.180 | expanding some of these management fellowships

00:58:26.700 | and the White House fellows,

00:58:28.580 | and, you know, bringing in, you know,

00:58:30.460 | scientists, you know, from the outside,

00:58:32.460 | giving, you know, that kind of opportunity

00:58:35.100 | for collaboration that we see in other spheres.

00:58:37.820 | - I think that's actually one of the biggest roles

00:58:40.460 | for a president that, for some reason,

00:58:43.580 | during the election, that's never talked about

00:58:46.460 | is how good are you at hiring

00:58:48.940 | and creating a culture of, like, attracting the right,

00:58:53.740 | I mean, basically chief hire.

00:58:55.580 | When you think of a CEO, like, the great CEOs are,

00:59:00.580 | I mean, maybe people don't talk about it that often,

00:59:04.140 | but they do more often for CEOs than they do for presidents,

00:59:08.180 | is, like, how good are you at building a team?

00:59:10.460 | - Well, we make it really difficult

00:59:11.620 | because of the political process.

00:59:12.740 | I mean, and also because we have

00:59:14.300 | so many political appointments,

00:59:16.060 | we ought to have less, to be honest.

00:59:17.740 | I mean, if you look at other governments around the world,

00:59:20.260 | you know, that are smaller,

00:59:21.660 | it's much easier for them to hire people in.

00:59:24.300 | You know, some of the most successful governments

00:59:25.580 | are much smaller, and it's not that I say that, you know,

00:59:28.140 | the government is necessarily too big,

00:59:29.620 | but it's just thinking about each unit in a different way.

00:59:32.980 | We shouldn't be having so many political appointments.

00:59:35.340 | We should kind of find more professional appointments,

00:59:37.060 | more non-partisan appointments,

00:59:39.180 | because, you know, every single administration

00:59:41.780 | that we've had over the last,

00:59:43.900 | let's see, span of presidencies,

00:59:45.740 | they have jobs that are unfulfilled

00:59:47.980 | because they can't get their candidates

00:59:50.060 | through Congress and the Senate

00:59:52.580 | because of all the kind of political games

00:59:54.140 | that are being played.

00:59:55.140 | I know loads of people have just been held up

00:59:57.140 | because it's just on the whim of, you know,

00:59:58.820 | some member of Congress,

01:00:00.380 | even though that the actual position that they want

01:00:02.180 | is really technical and doesn't really care about what,

01:00:05.460 | you know, what political preference they particularly have.

01:00:08.980 | So I think we have to try to look

01:00:11.660 | at the whole system of governments

01:00:13.020 | in the way that we would over, you know,

01:00:14.340 | other professional sectors,

01:00:17.780 | and to try to think about this as, just as you said there,

01:00:20.220 | that this is a government

01:00:21.100 | that's actually running our country.

01:00:23.500 | This is an operating system,

01:00:25.220 | and you wouldn't operate it like that

01:00:27.300 | if you were, you know, looking at it

01:00:28.500 | in any kind of rational way.

01:00:30.660 | It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan tainted.

01:00:34.980 | - So you're- - It's every level anyway.

01:00:36.340 | So I would actually just make a bid

01:00:38.380 | for a more non-partisan approach

01:00:40.540 | to a lot of the parts of government.

01:00:41.980 | You can still kind of bring in, you know,

01:00:43.700 | the political and premature,

01:00:45.020 | but also you have to explain to people

01:00:46.820 | writ large in America as well, that this is your government.

01:00:49.740 | And that actually you could also be part of this.

01:00:51.820 | You know, things like the Small Business Administration,

01:00:53.940 | the US Department of Agriculture,

01:00:55.540 | you know, all these kinds of things

01:00:56.580 | that actually people interact with,

01:00:58.540 | but they don't even know it,

01:00:59.380 | the Postal Service, you know, all of these things.

01:01:01.540 | I mean, people actually,

01:01:02.700 | when you ask them about different functions of government,

01:01:05.980 | they have a lot of support for it.

01:01:06.980 | The National Park Service, you know, for example,

01:01:08.620 | it's just when you talk about government

01:01:10.060 | in an abstract way, like, "Oh, yeah, no, too much,

01:01:13.500 | "bloated, you know, not efficient and effective."

01:01:15.940 | But if you kind of bring it down more

01:01:17.260 | to the kind of local and federal levels,

01:01:19.900 | that's kind of, you know, when people really see it.

01:01:22.220 | If people could see kind of themselves reflected,

01:01:24.740 | and many of the people have gone into public service,

01:01:26.620 | I think that they would- - Yeah, they need to be-

01:01:28.060 | - You know, have a lot more support for it.

01:01:29.340 | - More like superstars,

01:01:31.020 | like individuals that are like big on social media,

01:01:36.020 | big in the public eye, and having fun with it,

01:01:39.580 | and showing cool stuff that is not,

01:01:41.780 | 'cause right now, a lot of people see government

01:01:44.380 | as basically partisan warfare,

01:01:47.620 | and then it just, it makes it unpleasant to do the job.

01:01:52.620 | It makes it uninspiring for people looking in from outside

01:01:56.100 | about what's going on inside government,

01:01:57.940 | all of it, the whole thing.

01:01:59.180 | But you are, you know, just, with all due respect,

01:02:02.780 | you're a pretty rare individual in terms of nonpartisanship.

01:02:06.900 | Actually, your whole life story,

01:02:09.580 | the humbling aspect of your upbringing

01:02:13.340 | and everything like that,

01:02:15.140 | do you think it's possible to have a lot of nonpartisan

01:02:19.300 | experts in government?

01:02:21.260 | Like, can you be a top presidential advisor on Russia

01:02:26.420 | for 10 years, for 15 years, and remain nonpartisan?

01:02:31.420 | - I think you can.

01:02:32.340 | I don't think that's advisable, though, by the way,

01:02:34.060 | 'cause I mean, I don't think anybody should be there,

01:02:35.620 | you know, to see on forever.

01:02:36.460 | - So your first advice is to fight yourself after 10 years?

01:02:38.780 | - Well, you should definitely have term limits,

01:02:40.860 | just like you should in everything, right?

01:02:42.220 | I mean, it's just like tenure in university.

01:02:44.380 | - Well, we all have term limits.

01:02:46.300 | - Yeah, you kind of, you know, we do,

01:02:47.620 | we have natural term limits,

01:02:48.700 | but you know, you're kind of, you know,

01:02:50.260 | basically bottling it up for other people.

01:02:52.660 | I mean, you know, what I'm trying to do now,

01:02:54.540 | I mean, I'm 57 now, and I always try to work with,

01:02:57.940 | you know, people from different generations than me,

01:03:00.460 | just like, you know, I've really benefited from these,

01:03:03.860 | you know, kind of mentorships of people older.

01:03:06.420 | You can, you know, mentor up and well and mentor down.

01:03:08.580 | I mean, I would, you know, try to get, you know,

01:03:10.580 | people from different backgrounds and different generations

01:03:12.860 | to work together in teams, obviously.

01:03:14.300 | I'd like to more team networked kind of approach to things,

01:03:17.900 | the kind of things that you get again in science, right?

01:03:20.380 | I mean, all these ideas are gonna come

01:03:21.740 | from all kinds of different perspectives.

01:03:23.940 | Age and experience does count for something,

01:03:26.340 | but, you know, fresh ideas and coming in

01:03:28.020 | and looking at a problem from a different perspective

01:03:30.260 | and seeing something that somebody else hasn't seen before.

01:03:33.100 | I mean, I just, you know, kind of love working

01:03:35.220 | in an environment with all kinds of different people

01:03:38.340 | and people who don't agree with you.

01:03:39.620 | You need people to take you on and say,

01:03:42.500 | "Absolutely, that's crap."

01:03:43.860 | You know, kind of, "Where did you come up with that from?"

01:03:46.140 | And you go, "Hang on."

01:03:47.380 | Well, explain to me why you think so.

01:03:49.260 | And then, you know, you have this kind of

01:03:50.900 | iterative process back and forth.

01:03:52.380 | I mean, I would always encourage my colleagues

01:03:53.740 | to tell me when they thought I was wrong.

01:03:55.420 | I mean, sometimes I didn't agree

01:03:56.460 | because I didn't see the reasoning,

01:03:59.660 | but other times I'd be like, "They're right."

01:04:01.740 | You know, "That was a complete mistake.

01:04:03.820 | I need to admit that."

01:04:04.940 | And, you know, kind of, "We need to figure out

01:04:06.900 | a different way of doing things."

01:04:08.700 | But the one point I do want to get across

01:04:10.260 | is there were a lot of people

01:04:11.660 | who were non-partisan that I worked with.

01:04:13.540 | I mean, honestly, in most of the jobs that I had,

01:04:15.580 | up until more recently,

01:04:16.820 | I had no idea about people's political affiliation.

01:04:19.260 | It's just when you get into this kind of

01:04:20.740 | highly charged partisan environment,

01:04:22.900 | they kind of force people, you know, to make decisions.

01:04:26.180 | And when you have, you know, one political party

01:04:28.540 | or political faction that's trying to usurp power,

01:04:30.460 | it does make it quite difficult.

01:04:32.260 | I mean, that's the situation that we're in right now.

01:04:34.380 | And, you know, we're seeing some of the things

01:04:35.660 | happening in the United States I've seen

01:04:37.060 | and studied in other settings

01:04:38.340 | or seen for myself happening.

01:04:40.220 | You know, when you have a president

01:04:43.180 | who wants to cling onto power,

01:04:45.460 | you know, you've got to call that out.

01:04:48.180 | You know, is that a partisan act

01:04:49.700 | or is that a kind of, you know,

01:04:50.700 | a defense of that larger political system

01:04:54.420 | that you're part of?

01:04:56.500 | You know, so I think we've got to recognize that

01:04:59.780 | even if you're not partisan,

01:05:01.860 | you can be politically engaged.

01:05:03.500 | And, you know, sometimes you just have to

01:05:05.300 | stand up there and speak out,

01:05:06.740 | which is, you know, what I did

01:05:08.260 | and what others did as well.

01:05:09.540 | None of those people who spoke out,

01:05:11.300 | you know, can initially saw that as a partisan act,

01:05:13.420 | even if some of them since then

01:05:14.860 | have decided to make political choices

01:05:16.700 | they hadn't made before.

01:05:17.940 | Because, you know, the situation actually forced people

01:05:19.820 | into, you know, taking sides.

01:05:22.020 | It's very hard to still stay above the fray

01:05:24.380 | when you've got, you know,

01:05:25.220 | someone who's trying to perpetrate a coup.

01:05:26.900 | - Yeah, just to linger on that,

01:05:28.980 | I think it's hard and it's the courageous thing to do

01:05:33.220 | to criticize a president

01:05:35.220 | and not fall into partisanship after.

01:05:38.620 | Because the whole world will assume

01:05:41.220 | if you criticize Donald Trump,

01:05:43.260 | that you're clearly a Democrat.

01:05:47.540 | And so they will just,

01:05:49.780 | everybody will criticize you for being a Democrat.

01:05:52.620 | And then, so you're now stuck in that.

01:05:54.700 | So you're going to just embrace that role.

01:05:56.580 | But to still walk the nonpartisan route

01:05:58.820 | after the criticism, that's the hard road.

01:06:01.460 | So not let the criticisms break you into,

01:06:05.300 | you know, into a certain kind of ideological

01:06:10.540 | set of positions.

01:06:11.380 | - I mean, our political system needs revitalization.

01:06:14.180 | We need to be taking a long, hard look at ourselves here.

01:06:17.380 | And I think what people are calling out for,

01:06:19.420 | look, there's a vast swath of the population,

01:06:20.940 | like me, who are unaffiliated.

01:06:22.780 | You know, maybe some lean in one direction over another.

01:06:24.980 | And unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views

01:06:27.620 | about things and political opinions.

01:06:29.460 | And, you know, you may sound quite extreme on,

01:06:31.940 | you know, some of those, you know,

01:06:33.380 | either from a left or right perspective.

01:06:36.140 | What people are looking for is kind of an articulation,

01:06:39.180 | you know, of things in a kind of a clear way

01:06:40.780 | that they can get a handle on.

01:06:42.060 | And they're also looking for a representation.

01:06:43.900 | Somebody who's going to be there for you,

01:06:46.780 | you know, not part of a kind of a rigid team

01:06:48.340 | that you're excluded from, you know, the ins and the outs.

01:06:50.780 | But what people are looking at now,

01:06:52.140 | they're looking at that in the workplace

01:06:53.620 | because they're not finding that in politics.

01:06:57.740 | You're actually getting workers, you know,

01:06:59.540 | pushing the, people talk about the rise of the worker,

01:07:01.740 | but people just saying, hang on a sec,

01:07:03.060 | you know, the most important space that I'm in right now

01:07:06.860 | is my workplace because that's where my benefits are from.

01:07:09.140 | They're not coming from the state.

01:07:10.540 | I mean, that's a peculiarity of the United States system.

01:07:13.100 | You know, in Britain, you've got the National Health Service

01:07:14.820 | and you've got all the kind of national wide benefits.

01:07:17.140 | You know, you're not tethered to your employer

01:07:19.420 | like you are in the United States.

01:07:20.660 | But here now we're asking people, you know,

01:07:22.740 | people are pushing for more representation.

01:07:26.020 | They're asking to be represented within their workplace.

01:07:28.660 | Be it Starbucks where baristas are, you know,

01:07:31.020 | and other Starbucks employees are trying to unionize.

01:07:34.500 | We have unions among our research assistants,

01:07:36.700 | the Brookings Institution where I am, you know,

01:07:38.340 | kind of teaching assistants and big universities

01:07:40.460 | are doing the same kind of thing as well

01:07:42.220 | because they want to have their voice heard.

01:07:44.020 | They want to kind of play a larger role

01:07:45.580 | and they want to have change.

01:07:46.660 | And they're often pushing their companies

01:07:48.460 | or the institutions they work for to make that change

01:07:50.980 | because they don't see it happening in the political sphere.

01:07:55.420 | So it's not just enough to go out there

01:07:56.660 | and protest in the street,

01:07:57.860 | but if you want something to happen,

01:07:59.700 | that's why you're seeing big corporations

01:08:01.420 | playing a bigger role as well.

01:08:03.060 | - Yeah, and of course there's, you know,

01:08:05.860 | there's the longer discussion.

01:08:06.980 | There's also criticisms of that mechanisms of unions

01:08:10.380 | to achieve the giving of a voice to a people.

01:08:13.700 | This goes back to my own experience

01:08:16.180 | growing up in Northern England.

01:08:18.220 | The Durham miners that I was part of for generations,

01:08:22.020 | you know, first person in my family,

01:08:23.940 | not in the mines on my dad's side,

01:08:25.740 | they created their own association.

01:08:28.900 | It wasn't a union per se at the very beginning.

01:08:30.860 | Later they became part of the National Miners Union.

01:08:32.860 | They lost their autonomy and independence

01:08:34.420 | as a result of that.

01:08:35.700 | But what they did was they pooled their resources.

01:08:38.140 | They set up their own parliament

01:08:39.300 | so they could all get together.

01:08:40.380 | Literally they built a parliament

01:08:41.860 | and it opened in like the same time as World War I

01:08:44.540 | and where they all got together

01:08:45.420 | 'cause they didn't have the vote.

01:08:46.260 | They didn't have suffrage at the time

01:08:48.020 | because they didn't have any money, you know,

01:08:49.340 | so they couldn't pay the tax

01:08:50.540 | and they couldn't run for parliament.

01:08:52.660 | And this is, you know,

01:08:53.500 | the kind of the origins of the organized labor parties later,

01:08:57.100 | but they create this association

01:08:58.660 | so they could talk about how they could deal with things

01:09:00.420 | with their own communities

01:09:01.620 | and have a voice in the things that mattered.

01:09:04.740 | You know, education, improving their work conditions.

01:09:08.460 | It wasn't like what you think about

01:09:09.740 | some kind of like big political trade union

01:09:11.580 | with, you know, left-wing, you know, kind of ideas.

01:09:14.380 | In fact, they actually tried to root out later

01:09:16.300 | after the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union,

01:09:19.420 | even when they were still having ties

01:09:20.620 | with players like the miners of Donbass in the 1920s,

01:09:22.780 | Trotskyites and, you know, kind of Leninists

01:09:24.820 | and, you know, communists.

01:09:26.540 | They were more focused on how to improve

01:09:29.500 | their own wellbeing, you know,

01:09:32.060 | what they called the welfare.

01:09:33.060 | They had some welfare societies

01:09:34.740 | where they were kind of trying to think,

01:09:35.900 | and that's kind of what baristas in Starbucks want

01:09:39.180 | or workers in Amazon.

01:09:40.540 | They're looking about their own wellbeing.

01:09:41.820 | It's not just about pay and work conditions.

01:09:43.620 | It's about what it means to be part of this larger entity

01:09:47.140 | because you're not feeling that same kind of connection

01:09:50.620 | to politics, you know, at the moment,

01:09:52.900 | because, you know, you're being told by a representative,

01:09:55.380 | "Sorry, I don't represent you

01:09:56.460 | "because you didn't vote for me."

01:09:57.740 | You know, if you're not a Democrat,

01:09:58.780 | you're not a Republican, you're not red,

01:10:00.020 | you know, you're not blue, you're not mine.

01:10:02.700 | And so people are saying, "Well, I'm in this work class.

01:10:04.380 | "This is kind of my collective.

01:10:06.180 | "You know, this is, you know, therefore,

01:10:08.140 | "this is what I'm gonna have to try to push to make change."

01:10:10.500 | So, I mean, this is kind of happening here,

01:10:12.060 | and we have to, you know, realize that, you know,

01:10:14.860 | we've kind of gone in a way full circle

01:10:16.380 | back to that, you know, kind of period

01:10:17.700 | of the early emergence of sort of mass labor

01:10:20.260 | and, you know, that's where the political parties

01:10:22.540 | that we know today, and, you know,

01:10:24.420 | the kind of early unions came out of as well,

01:10:26.580 | this sort of feeling of a mass society,

01:10:28.700 | but where people weren't really able to get together

01:10:33.020 | and implement or push for change.

01:10:35.860 | - You know, with unions at a small scale and a local scale,

01:10:39.900 | it's like every good idea on a small scale

01:10:43.940 | can become a bad idea on a large scale.

01:10:46.580 | - On a large scale, yeah.

01:10:47.420 | - So like marriage is a beautiful thing,

01:10:51.220 | but at a large scale,

01:10:52.620 | it becomes the marriage industrial complex

01:10:54.980 | that tries to make money off of it,

01:10:56.740 | combined with the lawyers

01:10:58.140 | that try to make money off the divorce.

01:11:00.100 | It just becomes this caricature of a thing.

01:11:04.260 | Or like Christmas and the holidays, it's like, it's just-

01:11:07.980 | - I don't disagree, but what I'm saying is

01:11:10.140 | there's people are basically looking for something here

01:11:13.180 | and, you know, kind of, this is why, I mean,

01:11:14.700 | I myself am starting to think about much more local,

01:11:17.500 | you know, kind of solutions for a lot of these,

01:11:19.220 | you know, kind of problems.

01:11:20.140 | It's again, the teamed networked approach.

01:11:22.220 | - On the impeachment, looking back,

01:11:26.100 | because you're part of it, you get to experience it,

01:11:29.860 | do you think they strengthened or weakened this nation?

01:11:33.580 | - I think it weakened in many respects,

01:11:36.820 | just the way that it was conducted.

01:11:38.020 | I mean, there's a new book coming out

01:11:40.140 | by a couple of journalists in the Washington Post,

01:11:42.380 | I haven't actually seen it yet,

01:11:43.420 | but I really did, you know, kind of worry that,

01:11:46.780 | myself, that it became a spectacle.

01:11:49.820 | And although it actually, I think, in many respects,

01:11:54.620 | was important in terms of an exercise

01:11:57.260 | of civic responsibility and, you know,

01:11:59.060 | gave people a big, massive lesson in civics,

01:12:01.500 | everyone's kind of running out

01:12:02.540 | and looking up the whole process of impeachment

01:12:04.340 | and what that meant,

01:12:05.740 | kind of like congressional prerogatives I was as well,

01:12:07.700 | I was, you know, running off myself

01:12:09.340 | and trying to learn an enormous amount about it

01:12:11.660 | 'cause I was in the middle of all of this,

01:12:14.260 | that it didn't ultimately show responsibility

01:12:17.260 | and accountability.

01:12:18.260 | And that in itself was weakened

01:12:21.980 | because on both sides, there was a lot of partisan politics.

01:12:26.460 | I mean, I think that there was a dereliction of duty

01:12:31.740 | in many respects.

01:12:34.020 | I mean, especially, I have to say,

01:12:35.100 | on the part of Republican members of Congress,

01:12:37.780 | who were, you know, kind of,

01:12:38.700 | they should have been embracing, you know,

01:12:40.740 | Congress's prerogatives.

01:12:41.780 | You could have, you know, kind of basically done this

01:12:43.940 | in something of a different way.

01:12:45.980 | But the whole thing is because it was this larger atmosphere

01:12:50.980 | of polarized, well, not even polarized,

01:12:53.540 | but fractured politics.

01:12:55.860 | And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say,

01:12:58.180 | in many of the members of Congress on the Republican side.

01:13:01.860 | I mean, there's a lot of grandstanding

01:13:02.980 | that I really didn't like one bit

01:13:04.540 | on the Democratic side either.

01:13:06.660 | And not admitting to mistakes

01:13:08.540 | and, you know, not kind of addressing head-on,

01:13:11.100 | you know, the fact that they'd, you know,

01:13:12.620 | kind of been pushing for, you know,

01:13:14.100 | Trump to be impeached and, you know,

01:13:15.300 | talking about being an illegitimate president,

01:13:17.260 | you know, kind of right from the very beginning.

01:13:19.540 | And that, you know, as a result of that,

01:13:20.980 | a lot of people just saw this

01:13:22.100 | as kind of a continuation of, you know,

01:13:24.020 | political games, you know,

01:13:25.700 | coming out of the 2016 election.

01:13:28.660 | But on the Republican side, it was just a game.

01:13:31.060 | There was people I knew who were, you know,

01:13:33.740 | basically, you know, at one point, one of them winked at me.

01:13:36.980 | You know, in the middle of this, you know,

01:13:38.500 | kind of impeachment, it's just like,

01:13:39.780 | don't take this personally, you know, this is--

01:13:41.820 | - It's a game.

01:13:42.660 | - This is a game.

01:13:43.500 | And I just thought, this isn't a game.

01:13:45.060 | And that's why I think that it, you know,

01:13:46.380 | kind of weakened because, I mean, again, on the outside,

01:13:49.100 | it weakened us, the whole process weakened us

01:13:51.980 | in the eyes of the world, because again,

01:13:54.260 | the United States was the gold standard.

01:13:56.380 | And I do think, I mean, again,

01:13:57.540 | in the terms of the larger population,

01:13:59.500 | although a lot of people did actually see the system,

01:14:02.300 | you know, standing up, trying to do something

01:14:04.060 | to hold people account,

01:14:04.900 | but there still was that element of circus

01:14:07.540 | and a big political game

01:14:09.140 | and people being careless with the country.

01:14:10.900 | - But I do think that the Democrats

01:14:14.380 | were the instigators of the circus.

01:14:16.780 | So as a, it's perhaps subtle,

01:14:21.660 | but there's a different way you talk about issues

01:14:26.340 | or concerns about accountability

01:14:29.020 | when you care about your country,

01:14:31.620 | when you love your country, when you love the ideals,

01:14:34.100 | and when you, versus when you just want to win.

01:14:38.340 | - And stick it to the other side.

01:14:39.700 | No, I agree. - Stick it to the other side.

01:14:40.540 | - I agree.

01:14:41.380 | I mean, there were people who I actually thought

01:14:43.860 | managed that, that made it about the country

01:14:46.620 | rather than about themselves.

01:14:47.820 | - But I guess there's no incentive to do that.

01:14:49.820 | - Yeah, there were a lot of others

01:14:50.660 | who did a lot of grandstanding.

01:14:52.100 | Yeah.

01:14:52.940 | And that's another problem

01:14:54.220 | of our political incentive structures,

01:14:55.860 | that the kind of sense of accountability

01:14:57.580 | and responsibility tends to be personal.

01:15:00.060 | You know, whether people decide to do it or not.

01:15:02.140 | It's not institutional, if that makes sense.

01:15:04.780 | We've had a kind of a breakdown of that kind of, that sense.

01:15:07.500 | Now I took an oath of office,

01:15:09.260 | and I'm assuming that most of them did too.

01:15:11.500 | You know, I had to be sworn in, you know,

01:15:13.300 | when I took those positions.

01:15:14.700 | I took that seriously,

01:15:15.540 | but I already took an oath of citizenship.

01:15:17.900 | There's, you know, presumably you did too, you know.

01:15:20.420 | You kind of started to become an American citizen.

01:15:22.940 | It's not something you take on lightly.

01:15:25.180 | And, you know, that's why I felt

01:15:26.220 | this deep sense of responsibility all the time.

01:15:28.620 | Which is why I went into the administration

01:15:30.180 | in the first place.

01:15:31.020 | I mean, I got a lot of flack for it.

01:15:32.820 | Because, you know, I thought, well, look, I've been asked,

01:15:36.180 | and there's a real issue here,

01:15:38.140 | after the Russian interference

01:15:40.180 | and, you know, the whole influence operation

01:15:42.180 | in the 2016 elections.

01:15:43.540 | And I knew what was going on, and I should do something.

01:15:46.700 | You know, if not me, then, you know, okay,

01:15:50.500 | someone else will go and do it.

01:15:51.540 | But can I live with myself just sitting on the sidelines

01:15:53.860 | and criticizing what people are doing?

01:15:55.860 | You know, and kind of worrying about this?

01:15:57.780 | Or am I actually going to muck in there

01:15:59.140 | and, you know, just go and do something?

01:16:01.060 | It's like seeing your house on fire.

01:16:02.740 | And you see that, you know,

01:16:03.660 | okay, this is pretty awful and dangerous,

01:16:05.180 | but I could go in there and do something.

01:16:07.860 | - To clarify, the house on fire,

01:16:10.220 | meaning the cyber war that's going on,

01:16:13.900 | or cyber attacks, or cyber security.

01:16:15.660 | - Well, in the 2016, you know,

01:16:16.940 | when the Russians had interfered in the election.

01:16:19.460 | You know, I mean, basically,

01:16:21.100 | this was a huge national security crisis.

01:16:25.140 | And our politics, we'd gone mad as a result of it.

01:16:27.780 | And we, in fact, we were making the situation worse.

01:16:30.860 | And I felt that I could, you know, kind of,

01:16:33.060 | at the time, maybe I could do something here.

01:16:35.060 | I could try to clarify.

01:16:36.140 | I could, you know, work with others who I knew

01:16:38.420 | in the government from previous stints in the government

01:16:41.180 | to push back against this

01:16:42.220 | and try to make sure it didn't happen again.

01:16:43.500 | And look, and I also didn't have this, you know,

01:16:46.380 | mad, you know, kind of crazy ideological view

01:16:48.980 | of Russia either.

01:16:49.820 | I mean, I knew the place.

01:16:50.660 | I knew the people had been sitting a long time

01:16:52.220 | and quite calm about it.

01:16:53.420 | I don't take it personally.

01:16:55.060 | It's not kind of an extension of self.

01:16:57.660 | It's, you know, something I've spent a long time

01:16:59.340 | trying to understand for myself,

01:17:00.540 | going back to that very beginning

01:17:01.820 | of why were the Russians trying to blow us up?

01:17:03.500 | There must be an explanation.

01:17:04.620 | There was, it was a very complicated and complex explanation.

01:17:07.620 | It wasn't as simple as how it sounded.

01:17:10.020 | And also, there's a long tail to 2016.

01:17:14.020 | You know, Putin's perceptions,

01:17:15.340 | the kind of things that he thought were going on.

01:17:17.700 | You know, the whole way that what they did

01:17:20.940 | was actually fairly straightforward.

01:17:22.860 | They'd done this before in the Soviet period,

01:17:24.660 | during the Cold War, classic influence operation.

01:17:27.340 | It just had gone beyond the bounds

01:17:30.260 | of anything they could have anticipated

01:17:31.620 | because of social media

01:17:32.780 | and just a confluence of circumstances

01:17:35.020 | in the United States as well.

01:17:36.500 | We were very fragile and vulnerable.

01:17:38.580 | And I remember at one point having a discussion

01:17:40.820 | with the Russian ambassador,

01:17:43.100 | where, you know, we were complaining

01:17:45.100 | about the Russian intervention.

01:17:46.460 | He said, "Are you telling me that the United States

01:17:49.140 | "is a banana republic, that it's so vulnerable

01:17:51.500 | "to these kinds of efforts?"

01:17:52.820 | And he actually looked genuinely mystified.

01:17:55.020 | Although, you know, obviously it was probably,

01:17:56.700 | you know, part of a, you know,

01:17:58.220 | kind of political shtick there.

01:18:00.340 | But he had a point.

01:18:01.860 | The United States had never been that vulnerable

01:18:04.220 | as it suddenly was in 2016.

01:18:06.780 | And in the time that I was in government,

01:18:08.420 | and going back to what you asked about the whole impeachment

01:18:11.740 | and the whole exercise in Congress,

01:18:15.260 | that vulnerability was as stark as it, you know,

01:18:19.460 | ever could be.

01:18:20.300 | Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem

01:18:23.940 | as anything else.

01:18:24.780 | They were the kindling to all of the kind of the fires.

01:18:26.820 | Putin didn't start any of this,

01:18:29.540 | other kind of problems.

01:18:30.420 | Domestically, he just took advantage of them.

01:18:32.660 | And, you know, basically added a bit of an excellent

01:18:35.220 | here and there.

01:18:36.060 | - Yeah, the interference.

01:18:38.980 | I mean, that's a much longer discussion

01:18:40.980 | 'cause it's also for me, technically fascinating.

01:18:45.940 | I've been playing with the idea of just launching

01:18:49.460 | like a million bots, but that are doing just positive stuff

01:18:52.500 | and just being kind to people.

01:18:54.340 | - Yeah, I always kind of wonder if,

01:18:55.620 | is it possible to do something on this scale

01:18:57.460 | that's positive?

01:18:58.300 | Because, you know, a lot of people seem to be able

01:19:00.140 | to use all of this for pretty negative effect.

01:19:01.940 | You've got to kind of hope that you could do this,

01:19:03.260 | use the same networks for positive effect.

01:19:05.420 | - I think that's actually where a lot of the war,

01:19:07.860 | I think from the original hackers to today,

01:19:12.340 | what gives people like me,

01:19:14.220 | and I think a lot of people that,

01:19:16.500 | in the hacking community,

01:19:17.780 | the pleasure is to do something difficult,

01:19:20.100 | break through the systems and do the ethical thing.

01:19:25.100 | So do the, because if there's something broken

01:19:29.380 | about the system, you want to break through all the rules

01:19:33.500 | and do something that you know in your heart

01:19:35.340 | is the right thing to do.

01:19:36.700 | I mean, that's what Aaron Schwartz did

01:19:39.460 | with releasing journals and publications

01:19:43.060 | that were behind paywalls to the public

01:19:45.260 | and got arrested for it and then committed.

01:19:47.740 | But to me, it's fascinating because I,

01:19:50.300 | maybe you can actually educate me,

01:19:51.860 | but I felt that the Russian interference

01:19:56.220 | in terms of social engineering,

01:19:59.820 | in terms of bots, all that kind of stuff,

01:20:02.220 | I feel like that was more used for political bickering

01:20:05.940 | than to actually understand the national security problem.

01:20:08.700 | Because I would like to know the actual numbers involved

01:20:12.900 | in the influence.

01:20:13.740 | I would like to, I mean, obviously, hopefully,

01:20:16.220 | people now understand that better

01:20:18.340 | than are trying to defend the national security

01:20:20.980 | of this country.

01:20:21.860 | But it's just, it felt like, for example,

01:20:25.020 | if I launch one bot and then just contact somebody

01:20:30.020 | at the New York Times saying, "I launched this one bot,"

01:20:32.740 | they'll just say, "MIT scientist hacks," you know?

01:20:37.740 | (Donna laughs)

01:20:39.620 | And then that, they'll spread.

01:20:42.060 | - But that's exactly what happened.

01:20:43.620 | It was, you know, kind of, I think that, you know,

01:20:45.660 | Putin and some of the people around him understood

01:20:48.940 | because, again, propaganda state,

01:20:51.660 | they spend an awful lot of time thinking about how you,

01:20:54.340 | you know, basically put out your own content

01:20:56.460 | and how you get maximum effect through performance.

01:20:59.500 | Putin himself is a, you know,

01:21:01.180 | political performance artist.

01:21:03.260 | I mean, Trump understood exactly the same thing.

01:21:05.540 | They were actually operating in parallel,

01:21:08.100 | not in collusion, but in parallel.

01:21:10.140 | You know, basically, Trump understood

01:21:11.660 | how to get lots of free air time, you know,

01:21:13.660 | how to get himself at the center of attention.

01:21:16.020 | Putin, you know, did that through a kind of,

01:21:17.740 | I think, a less organic kind of way.

01:21:19.300 | You know, he had a lot of people working around him.

01:21:20.820 | I mean, that's the old, you know, Bolshevik agitprop

01:21:23.340 | and, you know, kind of then the whole

01:21:24.460 | Soviet propaganda machine.

01:21:25.820 | And, you know, Putin kind of growing up

01:21:27.860 | in that kind of environment and having, you know,

01:21:30.300 | kind of the Kremlin press office

01:21:31.580 | and all the kind of people around him,

01:21:33.340 | got kind of a massive machine, knew how that worked.

01:21:36.100 | I mean, they haven't done what the Chinese did in Russia,

01:21:38.420 | of like, you know, blocking everything

01:21:39.780 | and having a big firewall.

01:21:41.020 | It was kind of putting out lots of content,

01:21:42.420 | getting into the, you know, the sort of center of attention.

01:21:44.980 | Trump's doing the same kind of thing.

01:21:47.060 | And the Russians understood that, you know,

01:21:48.540 | if you put a bit of things out there

01:21:50.460 | and then you call up the New York Times

01:21:52.340 | and people are going to run with it.

01:21:53.860 | And what they wanted was the perception

01:21:56.340 | that they had actually swore the election.

01:21:58.500 | They loved it.

01:21:59.420 | This was the huge mistake of the Democrats and everything.

01:22:02.140 | I mean, I kept trying to push against this.

01:22:04.100 | No, they did not elect Donald Trump.

01:22:06.140 | Americans elected Donald Trump.

01:22:08.500 | And, you know, the electoral college was a key part.

01:22:11.540 | Vladimir Putin didn't make that up.

01:22:13.660 | You know, and basically, I also remember, you know,

01:22:16.460 | at one point the Russian ambassador, you know,

01:22:20.020 | talking to me about when we were doing the standard,

01:22:22.380 | you know, here we are, we're lodging our complaint

01:22:24.500 | about the interference, you know, he basically said,

01:22:27.780 | well, we didn't, you know, kind of invent Comey.

01:22:31.220 | And, you know, basically the, you know,

01:22:33.020 | the decision to reopen, you know, Hillary Clinton's emails

01:22:36.780 | or, you know, kind of Anthony Weiner

01:22:39.220 | and, you know, kind of his, you know,

01:22:41.940 | emails on his computer.

01:22:44.380 | And I was like, yeah, he's right.

01:22:46.980 | I mean, you know, there were plenty of things

01:22:48.580 | in our own system that created chaos and tipped the election.

01:22:53.220 | Not, you know, kind of what the Russians did,

01:22:55.460 | but, you know, it's obviously easier to blame the Russians

01:22:57.260 | and blame yourself when, you know, things are kind of,

01:22:59.700 | or those random forces and those random factors.

01:23:02.980 | Because people couldn't understand what had happened in 2016.

01:23:07.620 | There was no hanging chads like 2000,

01:23:09.660 | where there was, you know, kind of a technical problem

01:23:13.060 | that actually, you know, ended up with the intervention

01:23:15.100 | of the Supreme Court.

01:23:16.580 | There was, you know, pure and simple,

01:23:18.180 | the electoral college at work

01:23:20.020 | and a candidate that nobody had expected,

01:23:23.020 | including the Republicans in the primaries, you know,

01:23:25.540 | to end up getting kind of elected or put forward,

01:23:28.860 | you know, just from 2016, suddenly becoming the president.

01:23:31.700 | And they needed a meta explanation.

01:23:34.020 | It was much better to say Vladimir Putin had done it

01:23:36.340 | and Vladimir Putin and, you know, the Kremlin guys

01:23:38.180 | were like, "Oh my God, yeah, fantastic.

01:23:40.300 | Champagne, pop, pop, cocks popping.

01:23:42.380 | This is great. Our chaos agent."

01:23:44.180 | They knew they hadn't done it,

01:23:45.020 | but they'd love to take credit for it.

01:23:47.020 | And so, you know, the very fact that other people

01:23:48.900 | couldn't explain these complex dynamics to themselves,

01:23:53.500 | basically dovetails beautifully with Vladimir Putin's

01:23:58.060 | attempts to be the kind of the Kremlin gremlin in the system.

01:24:01.180 | And he's, you know, basically was taking advantage

01:24:03.580 | of that forever more.

01:24:04.420 | He wanted, you know, to basically try to work with us

01:24:07.300 | to cut through that.

01:24:08.140 | And the thing is then, you know, people lost faith

01:24:09.980 | in the integrity of the election system

01:24:11.700 | because people were out there, you know,

01:24:12.900 | suggesting that the Russians had actually

01:24:14.740 | distorted the elections.

01:24:15.580 | People had written books about that.

01:24:16.420 | They said, you know, that they hacked the system

01:24:18.460 | when, you know, they were trying to hack our minds.

01:24:20.940 | But again, we were the fertile soil for this.

01:24:23.660 | I mean, we know this from Russian history,

01:24:25.500 | the role of the Bolsheviks, you know,

01:24:27.140 | the whole 1920s and 1930s with Stalin,

01:24:30.540 | the fellow travelers and the, you know, socialist,

01:24:33.700 | you know, international.

01:24:35.020 | I mean, the Russians and the Soviets have been

01:24:37.780 | at this for years about kind of pulling, you know,

01:24:40.060 | kind of people along and into kind of a broader frame.

01:24:42.500 | But it didn't mean that they were influencing,

01:24:46.260 | you know, directly the politics of countries,

01:24:50.180 | you know, writ large.

01:24:51.020 | There were plenty of interventions.

01:24:52.580 | It's just that we were somehow,

01:24:54.660 | it was a confluence of events, a perfect storm.

01:24:57.180 | We were somehow exquisitely vulnerable

01:25:00.100 | because of things that we had done to ourselves.

01:25:03.620 | It was what Americans were doing to themselves

01:25:05.580 | that was the issue.

01:25:06.460 | - You think that's the bigger threat

01:25:09.460 | than large-scale bot armies?

01:25:12.260 | - Those can be a threat.

01:25:14.180 | Obviously, they do have an impact,

01:25:15.380 | but it's how people process information.

01:25:17.580 | It's kind of like the lack of critical thinking.

01:25:19.740 | I'm just not on the internet to that extent.

01:25:21.820 | I go looking for information.

01:25:23.620 | I'm not on social media.

01:25:25.460 | I'm in social media, but not by myself.

01:25:27.500 | You know, I don't put myself out there.

01:25:29.140 | I'm not, I haven't got a Twitter feed.

01:25:30.500 | I haven't got a blog. - You don't have

01:25:31.340 | a Twitter one, yeah.

01:25:32.180 | But there is a...

01:25:33.500 | - You have a fan club. - There's one called

01:25:34.340 | Fiona Hill's Cat.

01:25:35.180 | I have all kinds of strange things.

01:25:36.540 | It's Fiona Hill's Cat, which I kind of like.

01:25:38.140 | Occasionally, I have people send things to me.

01:25:38.980 | - You have so many fans.

01:25:40.540 | It's hilarious.

01:25:41.380 | - But what I try to do is just be really critical.

01:25:43.980 | I mean, my mom sends me stuff,

01:25:45.820 | and I'm like, "What is this?"

01:25:46.940 | You know, kind of.

01:25:48.260 | - Yeah.

01:25:49.460 | - It's just, you know, your own mother

01:25:51.340 | can be as much of an agent of misinformation

01:25:53.940 | as, you know, Vladimir Putin.

01:25:55.660 | - Oh, yeah.

01:25:56.500 | - I mean, we're all, you know,

01:25:57.340 | kind of we all have to really think

01:25:59.100 | about what it is we're reading.

01:26:00.140 | There's one thing from my childhood

01:26:01.500 | that was really important to me,

01:26:03.100 | and I always think every kid in school should have this.

01:26:06.180 | My next-door neighbor,

01:26:07.500 | who was, he was actually very active in the Labour Party,

01:26:14.020 | and he was, you know, kind of really interested

01:26:16.260 | in the way that opinion, you know,

01:26:18.100 | shaped people's political views.

01:26:19.580 | And he was Welsh.

01:26:20.420 | He was a native Welsh speaker,

01:26:21.300 | so, you know, he was always trying to explore English

01:26:23.940 | and how, you know, there was kind of the reach of,

01:26:26.220 | you know, the English culture,

01:26:27.820 | and, you know, kind of how it was kind of shaping

01:26:29.460 | the way that people thought.

01:26:30.340 | And he used to read every single newspaper,

01:26:32.540 | you know, from all the different spectrums,

01:26:33.820 | which was quite easy to do, you know,

01:26:35.460 | back in the '70s and '80s,

01:26:36.540 | 'cause there weren't that many in the UK context.

01:26:39.060 | And every Sunday, he would get

01:26:40.100 | all the different Sunday papers

01:26:41.580 | from all the different kind of ideological vantage points.

01:26:44.340 | And then when I got to be a teenager,

01:26:46.020 | he'd invite me to look at them with him,

01:26:48.660 | 'cause he was my godfather,

01:26:49.700 | and he was just an incredible guy,

01:26:51.460 | and he was just super interesting,

01:26:53.020 | and, you know, kind of culturally, you know,

01:26:54.900 | an outsider, always kind of looking in.

01:26:57.420 | And he basically ran through, you know,

01:26:59.620 | what "The Guardian" looked at,

01:27:00.780 | "The Observer," "The Daily Mail," "The Sun,"

01:27:02.980 | you know, kind of all of these, you know,

01:27:04.100 | "The Telegraph," all of these newspapers,

01:27:06.500 | and how you could tell, you know,

01:27:08.460 | their different vantage points.

01:27:10.580 | And, of course, it's complicated to do that now.

01:27:12.700 | I mean, in this, you know,

01:27:13.860 | incredibly extensive media space.

01:27:17.420 | I look at what it is that they're saying,

01:27:19.340 | and then I try to, you know, read around it,

01:27:21.540 | and then, you know, look at what other people are saying,

01:27:23.540 | and why they're saying it, and who are they,

01:27:25.300 | what's their context.

01:27:26.860 | And that was kind of basically

01:27:27.740 | what I was taught to look at.

01:27:29.020 | And I think everybody should have that.

01:27:31.260 | - And certainly that's something that people in politics

01:27:35.180 | that are in charge of directing policy should be doing.

01:27:38.260 | - They should be.

01:27:39.100 | - Not getting lost in the,

01:27:40.660 | in the sort of the hysteria that can be created.

01:27:45.900 | It does seem that the American system somehow,

01:27:49.220 | not the political system, just humans, love drama.

01:27:53.180 | A very good, like the Hunter Biden laptop story.

01:27:57.620 | There's always like one, two, three stories somehow

01:28:01.740 | that we just pick, that we're just gonna,

01:28:03.740 | this is the stuff we're gonna fight about for this election.

01:28:08.740 | - And everyone's got an opinion on it.

01:28:10.100 | Everybody. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:28:11.580 | - And it's the most, like Hillary Clinton's emails,

01:28:14.780 | the Russians hacked the election.

01:28:16.100 | - Yeah, we had John Podesta's pasta recipes for a while,

01:28:19.300 | you know, that we were kind of all obsessing over.

01:28:21.180 | I don't know, people running out and trying them out,

01:28:22.740 | you know, something like that.

01:28:23.580 | - And there's fun, I mean, there's all,

01:28:26.100 | there's the best conspiracy theories about Giuliani.

01:28:30.260 | I just love it.

01:28:31.100 | We just pick a random story.

01:28:32.180 | Sometimes it's ridiculous.

01:28:33.540 | - And it detracts from what the larger question should be,

01:28:35.820 | which is about the family members of, you know,

01:28:37.740 | senior officials and whether they should be anywhere near

01:28:40.900 | any of the issues that they're, you know,

01:28:43.140 | there's ethics, there's government ethics and things there,

01:28:45.500 | you know, kind of across the board.

01:28:46.540 | But there's a bigger story in there,

01:28:47.820 | but that becomes a distraction.

01:28:49.380 | It's a look over there, you know,

01:28:51.260 | the oldest trick in the book, you know, kind of idea.

01:28:54.820 | - Yes, given- - And politicians

01:28:56.020 | are really good at that because it detracts

01:28:57.820 | from the larger question because every single member

01:28:59.940 | of Congress and, you know, government official,

01:29:02.780 | their family should be nowhere near anything they're doing.

01:29:05.980 | - Well, that I could push back and disagree on.

01:29:09.020 | I mean, I understand- - Well, it depends

01:29:10.260 | on what they do, if they're making money out of it,

01:29:12.100 | you know, and kind of basically being in business

01:29:14.020 | is what I mean, you know, kind of this is an issue.

01:29:16.740 | So it's not, you know, Hunter Biden on his own.

01:29:19.980 | It's, you know, kind of basically the kids of, you know,

01:29:22.740 | the Trump family, you name it.

01:29:25.180 | - Yeah, in general like that, I just think it's funny.

01:29:29.540 | Like, there's a lot of families that, you know,

01:29:33.060 | they work very closely together, do business together,

01:29:35.300 | and it's very successful.

01:29:36.700 | I get very weird about that.

01:29:38.820 | It just feels like you're not, in fact,

01:29:42.140 | I don't even like hiring or working with friends initially.

01:29:47.140 | You make friends with the people you work with, but-

01:29:49.140 | - That's right, no, I have the same worries as well

01:29:51.700 | because in the kind of clouds, you know,

01:29:53.140 | I would encourage, you know, my daughter

01:29:55.220 | to do something completely different.

01:29:57.140 | - Right. - Not go into the same field.

01:29:58.660 | Now, look, it's different if you're, you know,

01:30:00.620 | in science or, you know, mathematics or something like this,

01:30:03.620 | and, you know, maybe, you know, kind of,

01:30:04.820 | you've got a family, maybe you're kind of building

01:30:06.220 | on some of their theories and ideas, you know.

01:30:08.260 | If Albert Einstein had a, you know, kind of an offspring

01:30:11.500 | who was in mathematics and took, you know,

01:30:13.180 | father's thinking, you know, further,

01:30:14.940 | that would be very different.

01:30:16.460 | But if it's, you know, kind of you're in business

01:30:18.180 | and other things, and it's just, you know,

01:30:20.100 | it's the nepotism problem that no one has there.

01:30:22.700 | - Well, science has that too, in the space of ideas.

01:30:24.460 | - Yeah, well, they do.

01:30:25.300 | If they're not, people aren't coming in

01:30:26.140 | and building on the ideas in a constructive way.

01:30:28.380 | - Right, but even for son, daughter of Einstein,

01:30:31.420 | you wanna think outside the box of the previous.

01:30:34.860 | - Yeah, well, that's what I'm meaning,

01:30:35.940 | but I mean, it's just, but they shouldn't be sort of told,

01:30:37.540 | no, sorry, you can't go and study math 'cause, you know,

01:30:40.140 | whatever, physics, you know, because of.

01:30:42.180 | - But a lot of that, you can't actually make it into law.

01:30:45.220 | Well, you could, I suppose, but honestly,

01:30:47.580 | if you do that kind of thing,

01:30:49.100 | you should be transparent.

01:30:50.220 | There should be just an honesty about it.

01:30:51.060 | - It gets back to what I was talking about

01:30:52.820 | before, we need diversity of views

01:30:54.180 | and diversity of thinking, and you can't have other things.

01:30:56.180 | It's like being partisan or, you know,

01:30:58.140 | rooting just for a team.

01:31:01.180 | You know, if something's gonna cloud your judgment

01:31:03.780 | or constrain the way you think about things

01:31:06.140 | and become, you know, kind of a barrier to moving on out.

01:31:09.180 | And look, that's what we see in the system around Putin.

01:31:12.060 | It's kind of kleptocratic, and it's, you know,

01:31:14.980 | it's filled with nepotism.

01:31:16.460 | All of the kind of like the people

01:31:18.060 | who you kind of see out there

01:31:19.540 | in prominent positions are the sons or daughters of,

01:31:22.020 | including Putin himself.

01:31:23.620 | I mean, that's when a system has degenerated.

01:31:26.180 | And that's, you know, kind of,

01:31:27.180 | and I suppose in a way,

01:31:28.580 | this is a symbol of the degeneration of the system,

01:31:30.540 | but again, it's just a diversion from, you know,

01:31:33.420 | kind of the bigger issues and bigger implications

01:31:35.820 | of things that we're discussing.

01:31:37.460 | - So critics on the left often use the straw man of TDS,

01:31:42.860 | Trump Derangement Syndrome.

01:31:47.380 | Why does Donald Trump arouse so much emotion in people?

01:31:51.380 | - It's just the nature of the person.

01:31:53.980 | I mean, I don't feel particularly emotional about him.

01:31:57.060 | I mean, he's kind of a, he's a very flawed guy,

01:32:01.060 | to be honest, and this may seem bizarre,

01:32:03.020 | I felt sorry for him,

01:32:04.580 | because this guy is so vulnerable,

01:32:06.860 | so wrapped up in himself,

01:32:10.100 | that, I mean, he's just exquisitely open to manipulation.

01:32:15.260 | And I saw people taking advantage of him all the time,

01:32:17.780 | and he has zero self-awareness.

01:32:20.260 | I mean, I kept thinking to myself,

01:32:21.300 | my God, if this guy didn't have this entourage around him,

01:32:23.780 | how would he function?

01:32:24.900 | I mean, I felt sorry for us as well,

01:32:27.260 | I mean, that he ended up being our president,

01:32:28.620 | 'cause that should not have happened,

01:32:29.900 | I mean, in terms of character,

01:32:31.540 | and in terms of fit for the job.

01:32:34.260 | Although I saw this, you know,

01:32:35.260 | kind of over a period of time,

01:32:36.620 | but I didn't feel, you know, kind of any,

01:32:41.700 | you know, sense of derangement, you know,

01:32:45.620 | kind of around him.

01:32:46.460 | He didn't drive me nuts in that way,

01:32:47.900 | I just became, I was just very worried about,

01:32:50.940 | you know, the kind of the impact that he was having

01:32:53.300 | on many particular issues.

01:32:55.380 | - Here's the important thing,

01:32:56.820 | so what I noticed with people that criticize Donald Trump

01:32:59.740 | is they get caught up in the momentum of it,

01:33:05.300 | and they're unable to see,

01:33:09.220 | first of all, let's start with some ground truth,

01:33:11.740 | which is approximately half the country voted for the guy,

01:33:16.740 | right?

01:33:19.540 | - Yep, and more voted in 2020 than voted in 2016 for him.

01:33:23.660 | Yep.

01:33:24.500 | - And I just feel like people don't load that in

01:33:28.140 | when they're honestly criticizing.

01:33:28.980 | - And a lot of those people didn't vote for him

01:33:32.940 | and his personality, and often could,

01:33:34.780 | because I know a lot of people that voted for him,

01:33:37.020 | first time and second time,

01:33:39.260 | and they could disassociate, you know,

01:33:42.900 | kind of all of the kind of features of Donald Trump

01:33:45.900 | that drives other people nuts from, you know,

01:33:48.020 | what they thought that an actual fact he could achieve

01:33:50.540 | in terms of, and it wasn't just this kind of sense about,

01:33:53.300 | well, I couldn't possibly vote for Democrats.

01:33:55.260 | Sometimes it's just like, well, look, he shakes things up

01:33:58.100 | and we need things to shake, to be shoken up and--

01:34:00.660 | - Some people might've voted for him for personality.

01:34:02.900 | See, this is what I'm trying to tell you.

01:34:03.740 | - Yeah, some of them did as well,

01:34:05.180 | but I'm just saying that not all of them did either.

01:34:06.900 | - We don't know that data, that's the thing.

01:34:08.500 | - But yeah, I can't say I'm just saying anecdotally,

01:34:11.220 | I know people have voted for him because he's him,

01:34:13.340 | from the charisma and others who voted

01:34:16.220 | because he's shaking things up

01:34:17.980 | and, you know, he's keeping people on their toes

01:34:20.940 | and, you know, kind of, we need that, you know, idea.

01:34:24.540 | - But the way to avoid Trump Derangement Syndrome, to me,

01:34:28.740 | me as a doctor, I'm sort of prescribing to the patients

01:34:32.300 | on this syndrome, this issue,

01:34:36.060 | is I feel like you have to empathize with the people.

01:34:39.700 | Well, you have to imagine in your mind

01:34:41.180 | all the different, like, strengths

01:34:45.580 | that the people who have voted for Donald Trump see

01:34:49.460 | and really understand it, really feel it,

01:34:52.540 | like walk around with it and then criticize.

01:34:56.580 | Like, I just feel like people get lost

01:34:58.860 | in this bubble of criticism, in their own head.

01:35:00.860 | Forget like the tribe you're in or whatever,

01:35:03.160 | in their own head, they're not able to see,

01:35:05.460 | like half this country that we're a part of

01:35:08.380 | voted for the person, same with Biden.

01:35:11.540 | Half the country voted for the guy.

01:35:13.860 | The people that are criticizing Biden

01:35:15.580 | and they're doing this,

01:35:16.860 | the way Biden is currently criticized

01:35:20.460 | is not based on policy.

01:35:22.900 | It's based on personal stuff similar like to Trump.

01:35:27.900 | - Yeah, I know it is.

01:35:28.740 | I mean, that's what people don't look.

01:35:29.700 | I think part of that is, I mean, look, first of all,

01:35:33.020 | I want to say I completely agree with you

01:35:34.500 | about understanding where people are coming from.

01:35:36.380 | And I think it's very important for people

01:35:37.660 | to listen to other people and their views.

01:35:39.900 | I try to do that all the time, try to learn from that.

01:35:42.660 | You know, I mean, everybody's got a perspective

01:35:45.340 | and a context.

01:35:46.180 | We all live in a certain context.

01:35:47.300 | We're all living in history, our own personal histories,

01:35:49.780 | matter a lot, and also the larger context

01:35:51.940 | and environment in which we're living in

01:35:53.820 | and where we live and who we live with.

01:35:56.580 | And, you know, the kinds of lives that we lead as well,

01:35:58.580 | those are all extraordinarily important.

01:36:00.260 | I mean, I know that from myself.

01:36:02.020 | Everything that I've done in my life

01:36:03.780 | has been shaped by where I came from,

01:36:05.540 | who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things.

01:36:07.980 | You can't take yourself out of that.

01:36:09.860 | I mean, you can do it in some, you know,

01:36:11.500 | like a science or something else,

01:36:12.780 | but, you know, it's still your own views

01:36:14.260 | and maybe some of the ideas that you have.

01:36:15.940 | And pursuing an experiment might have been shaped

01:36:17.700 | by your larger context, you know,

01:36:19.620 | depending on what it is that you work on.

01:36:21.380 | But the other thing is the nature of the political system.

01:36:24.700 | The presidential election is like a personality contest,

01:36:29.060 | a beauty contest.

01:36:30.420 | It's like a kind of a referendum on, you know,

01:36:32.540 | one person or another.

01:36:34.380 | It's kind of like what we see in Russia, honestly,

01:36:35.980 | with, you know, Putin or not Putin,

01:36:37.220 | or Putin and Putin before.

01:36:39.580 | You know, it's all about Putin.

01:36:40.700 | And, you know, what do you think about Putin?

01:36:42.180 | It's all about what the president should be doing

01:36:45.020 | and, you know, kind of what their policies are.

01:36:47.100 | That's kind of the bizarreness of the US political system.

01:36:51.300 | Look, we've just seen this happening in the United Kingdom.

01:36:53.700 | You've got this core of a couple of thousand,

01:36:55.940 | couple of hundred thousand, rather,

01:36:57.460 | people in the Conservative Party

01:36:58.660 | who've just voted for, you know, three leaders in a row.

01:37:03.020 | The rest of the country isn't.

01:37:03.860 | And they're just looking at, you know,

01:37:04.820 | whether they like that personality

01:37:06.220 | and, you know, what they say to them

01:37:08.260 | rather than what they're necessarily

01:37:09.420 | going to do for the country.

01:37:11.140 | I mean, which is, you know, kind of pretty absurd.

01:37:13.100 | And again, the presidency is a weird hybrid

01:37:16.420 | in the United States.

01:37:17.300 | You know, we were talking before about,

01:37:18.620 | it's the person who should be running the country.

01:37:20.260 | It's the chief executive or the prime minister

01:37:22.420 | in another setting.

01:37:23.300 | But we don't think of it like that.

01:37:25.140 | You know, we often think about whether we like the guy

01:37:26.780 | or not, or, you know,

01:37:27.620 | we'd like to hang out with him or the, you know,

01:37:29.580 | one of my younger relatives.

01:37:31.180 | And I said, "So why did you vote for Trump?"

01:37:32.620 | He said, "Well, he was great.

01:37:33.460 | "He was funny.

01:37:34.300 | "I went to his rallies.

01:37:35.140 | "I got, you know, all kind of charged up."

01:37:36.980 | And I said, "Could you see yourself voting for Biden?"

01:37:38.900 | "No, he's too old."

01:37:39.740 | And I said, "Well, you know, he's only just a little bit,

01:37:41.620 | "you know, kind of older than Trump."

01:37:44.260 | Or he's, you know, the same age as your grandma.

01:37:46.260 | Do you think your grandma's older?

01:37:47.260 | "Oh, no, not at all."

01:37:48.100 | But it's just this kind of perception.

01:37:49.220 | He's boring, you know?

01:37:50.380 | So there's, people are actually sometimes, you know,

01:37:52.820 | basically being, you know,

01:37:54.340 | kind of motivated by just a feeling, you know,

01:37:57.380 | kind of that kind of sense,

01:37:58.460 | because that's the sort of nature of the, you know,

01:38:00.540 | the presidency.

01:38:01.380 | It's this kind of how you feel about yourself as an American

01:38:04.380 | or how you feel about the country at large,

01:38:06.100 | the kind of the symbol of the state.

01:38:07.820 | Look, you know, in Britain,

01:38:08.780 | you had Queen Elizabeth II and everybody, you know,

01:38:11.900 | seemed to, for the most part, not everyone, I guess,

01:38:14.060 | but most people respected her as a person,

01:38:16.900 | as a personality, as a kind of symbol of the state,

01:38:18.780 | even if they actually didn't really like

01:38:20.500 | the institution of the monarchy.

01:38:22.060 | There was something, you know,

01:38:22.900 | kind of about that particular personality

01:38:25.820 | that you were able to, you know,

01:38:27.660 | kind of relate to in that context.

01:38:29.140 | But in the United States,

01:38:30.300 | we've got all of that rolled into one,

01:38:31.500 | the head of state, the symbol of the state,

01:38:33.260 | the kind of queen, the king, the kind of idea,

01:38:35.540 | the chief executive, the kind of prime ministerial role,

01:38:38.140 | and then the commander in chief of the military.

01:38:40.220 | It's all things, you know, kind of at once,

01:38:42.580 | but ultimately for a lot of people,

01:38:43.940 | it's just how we feel about that person.

01:38:45.820 | Oh, I couldn't go vote for them because of this,

01:38:47.460 | or I couldn't vote for them because of that.

01:38:49.460 | And in 2016, you know,

01:38:51.820 | Hillary Clinton actually did win the election

01:38:53.620 | in terms of the popular vote.

01:38:55.260 | So it wasn't that, you know,

01:38:56.300 | kind of people wouldn't vote for a woman.

01:38:58.020 | I mean, more people voted for her on the popular level,

01:39:01.780 | not obviously, you know, through the electoral college

01:39:04.060 | in the electoral college vote.

01:39:05.140 | So it wasn't just, you know, gender or something like that,

01:39:08.100 | but it was an awful lot of things

01:39:09.420 | for people who found Trump attractive,

01:39:11.900 | because he was sticking up the big middle finger

01:39:13.940 | to the establishment.

01:39:15.220 | He's an anti-establishment change character.

01:39:17.540 | There was a lot of people voted for Barack Obama

01:39:19.540 | for the same reason and voted for Trump.

01:39:21.260 | We know that phenomenon, what was it, 11,

01:39:23.060 | you know, 12% of people, you know,

01:39:25.140 | so they could vote for some completely,

01:39:27.060 | totally different, radically different people

01:39:29.420 | because of that sort of sense of change and charisma.

01:39:32.260 | I mean, I had people who I knew voted for Trump,

01:39:34.100 | but would have voted for Obama again if he'd run again,

01:39:37.020 | because they just liked the way that he spoke,

01:39:39.620 | they liked the way that, you know, 'cause they said,

01:39:42.540 | I mean, this is all my own anecdotal things,

01:39:44.340 | but one of my relatives said,

01:39:45.980 | "I could listen to Obama all day, every day.

01:39:47.740 | I just love the way he sounded.

01:39:49.380 | I love the way he looked."

01:39:50.340 | You know, I just like the whole thing about him.

01:39:52.220 | And then to say about Trump, well, he was exciting.

01:39:54.260 | He was interesting.

01:39:55.100 | You know, he was kind of like, you know,

01:39:56.140 | whipping it up there.

01:39:57.380 | You know, so there's this, just this kind of feeling.

01:39:59.900 | You know, we always say about, you know,

01:40:01.060 | could you have a beer with this person?

01:40:03.140 | And people decide they couldn't have one

01:40:05.140 | with Hillary Clinton.

01:40:06.540 | And, you know, maybe they could go off

01:40:08.260 | and have one with Barack Obama and with Donald Trump.

01:40:13.260 | They didn't want to have one with Joe Biden,

01:40:15.420 | you know, for example.

01:40:16.660 | And remember, George W. Bush didn't drink,

01:40:18.300 | so he wouldn't have had a beer with him.

01:40:19.580 | He'd have gone out and got a soda or something with him.

01:40:22.020 | But, you know, there's this,

01:40:23.540 | there's that kind of element

01:40:25.180 | of just that sort of personal connection

01:40:27.780 | in the way that the whole presidential election is set up.

01:40:31.260 | It's less about the parties.

01:40:32.700 | It's less about the platforms,

01:40:34.860 | and it's more about the person.

01:40:36.420 | - Yeah, and picking one side

01:40:39.940 | and like sticking with your person.

01:40:41.460 | It really like a support team.

01:40:43.260 | - Yeah, it is, yeah.

01:40:44.780 | - What do you think about Vladimir Putin,

01:40:47.540 | the man and the leader?

01:40:49.980 | Let's actually look at the full,

01:40:52.060 | you've written a lot about him,

01:40:53.820 | the recent Vladimir Putin

01:40:55.580 | and the full context of his life.

01:40:57.820 | Let's zoom out and look at the last 20 plus years

01:41:04.140 | of his rule.

01:41:04.980 | In what ways has he been good for Russia?

01:41:08.780 | In what ways bad?

01:41:10.140 | - Well, if you look to the first couple of terms

01:41:14.580 | of his presidency,

01:41:16.780 | I think, you know, on the overall ledger,

01:41:20.180 | he would have actually said

01:41:21.020 | that he made a lot of achievements from Russia.

01:41:23.700 | Now, there was, of course,

01:41:24.900 | the pretty black period of the war in Chechnya,

01:41:28.420 | but, you know, he didn't start that.

01:41:29.900 | That was Boris Yeltsin.

01:41:31.780 | That was obviously a pretty catastrophic event.

01:41:36.140 | But if you look at then other parts of the ledger

01:41:38.700 | of what Putin was doing,

01:41:40.300 | you know, from the 2000s, you know, onwards,

01:41:43.180 | he stabilized the Russian economy,

01:41:46.220 | brought back, you know, kind of confidence

01:41:49.340 | in the Russian economy and financial system.

01:41:52.340 | He built up a pretty impressive team of technocrats

01:41:56.260 | for everything, the central bank and the economics

01:41:58.180 | and finance ministries,

01:42:00.660 | who, you know, really got the country back into shape again

01:42:03.700 | and solvent, paid off all of the debts,

01:42:06.820 | and, you know, really started to build the country

01:42:10.060 | back up again domestically.

01:42:12.100 | And, you know, the first couple of terms,

01:42:14.500 | again, putting Chechnya, you know, to one side,

01:42:17.100 | which was a little hard because, I mean,

01:42:18.340 | there was quite a lot of atrocities.

01:42:20.060 | And I have to say that, you know,

01:42:22.020 | he was pretty involved in all of that

01:42:23.300 | because the FSB, which he'd headed previously,

01:42:26.260 | you know, was in charge of wrapping up Chechnya,

01:42:28.300 | and it created, you know,

01:42:29.620 | kind of a very strange sort of system of fealty,

01:42:32.460 | almost a feudal system,

01:42:34.020 | and the kind of relationship between Putin at the top

01:42:36.860 | and Kadyrov in Chechnya.

01:42:38.060 | And there was quite a lot of distortions,

01:42:39.620 | you know, kind of as a result of that

01:42:40.940 | in the way that the Russian Federation was run.

01:42:43.140 | You know, a lot more of an emphasis

01:42:44.900 | on the security services, for example,

01:42:47.380 | but there was a lot of pragmatism,

01:42:48.860 | you know, opening up the country for business,

01:42:52.020 | you know, basically extending our relationships.

01:42:54.980 | I would say that, you know,

01:42:56.820 | by the end of those first couple of terms of Putin,

01:43:00.620 | Russians were living their best lives.

01:43:02.540 | You know, there was a lot of opportunity for people.

01:43:06.340 | People's labor, you know, was being paid for.

01:43:09.220 | They weren't being taxed.

01:43:10.340 | The taxes were coming out of the extractive industries.

01:43:13.140 | There was, you know, kind of, I guess,

01:43:15.940 | a sense of much more political pluralism,

01:43:18.460 | but it wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Eltsin period.

01:43:21.180 | And then you see a shift.

01:43:23.060 | And it's pretty much when he comes back into power again

01:43:26.500 | in 2011, 2012,

01:43:29.220 | and that's when we see kind of a different phase emerging.

01:43:32.180 | And, you know, part of it

01:43:34.260 | is the larger international environment

01:43:37.100 | where Putin himself has become kind of convinced

01:43:39.540 | that the United States is out to get him.

01:43:41.980 | And part of it goes back to the decision

01:43:44.900 | on the part of the United States to invade Iraq in 2003.

01:43:47.740 | There's also, you know,

01:43:49.540 | the recognition of Kosovo in 2008,

01:43:51.780 | and, you know, the whole kind of machinations

01:43:54.540 | around all kinds of, you know,

01:43:55.740 | other issues of NATO expansion and elsewhere.

01:43:58.100 | But Iraq in 2003,

01:44:00.340 | and this kind of whole idea after that,

01:44:02.060 | that the United States is in the business of regime change,

01:44:04.620 | and perhaps, you know, has him in his crosshairs as well.

01:44:07.900 | But there's also then kind of, I think,

01:44:09.580 | a sense of building crisis

01:44:11.860 | after the financial crisis and the Great Recession,

01:44:16.180 | 2008, 2009,

01:44:17.740 | because I think Putin up until then believed in,

01:44:21.500 | you know, the whole idea of the global financial system

01:44:23.500 | and that Russia was prospering,

01:44:26.180 | and that Russia, you know, part of the G8

01:44:28.220 | and actually could be genuinely one of the, you know,

01:44:30.020 | the major economic and financial powers.

01:44:32.660 | And then suddenly he realizes

01:44:35.500 | that in the West is incompetent,

01:44:38.020 | that, you know, we totally mismanaged the economy

01:44:40.260 | of our own, the financial crash in the United States,

01:44:42.780 | the kind of blowing up of the housing bubble,

01:44:46.940 | and that we were feckless,

01:44:48.900 | and that that had global reverberations.

01:44:52.020 | And he's prime minister, of course,

01:44:53.420 | you know, in this kind of period.

01:44:55.300 | But then, you know,

01:44:56.140 | and I think that that kind of compels him

01:44:57.420 | to kind of come back into the presidency

01:44:59.020 | and try to kind of take things under control again

01:45:01.780 | in 2011, 2012.

01:45:03.140 | And after that, he goes into kind of a much more

01:45:05.660 | sort of focused role where he sees the United States

01:45:08.140 | as a bigger problem.

01:45:10.540 | And he also, you know, starts to, you know,

01:45:14.500 | kind of focus on also the domestic environment,

01:45:18.060 | because his return to the presidency is met by protests.

01:45:21.460 | And he genuinely seems to believe,

01:45:23.060 | because again, this is very similar to belief here

01:45:25.460 | in the United States that Donald Trump

01:45:26.740 | couldn't possibly be elected by Americans,

01:45:28.220 | that somehow there was some kind of external interference,

01:45:31.300 | because the Russians interfered and had an impact.

01:45:33.660 | Putin himself thinks at that time,

01:45:35.700 | it's one of the reasons why he interferes

01:45:36.980 | in our elections later,

01:45:38.100 | that the United States and others had interfered,

01:45:40.580 | because he knew that people weren't that thrilled

01:45:42.180 | about him coming back.

01:45:43.380 | They kind of liked the Medvedev period.

01:45:46.020 | And the protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg

01:45:49.060 | and other major cities,

01:45:50.460 | he starts to believe are instigated by the West,

01:45:52.460 | by the outside, because of, you know,

01:45:54.580 | funding for transparency in elections

01:45:57.700 | and, you know, all of the NGOs and others,

01:46:00.980 | you know, they're operating,

01:46:01.940 | State Department, embassy funding,

01:46:04.180 | you know, and, you know,

01:46:05.660 | the whole attitude of, "God, he's back,"

01:46:07.500 | you know, kind of thing.

01:46:08.980 | And so after that,

01:46:09.820 | we see Putin going on a very different footing.

01:46:12.660 | It's also somewhere in that period, 2011, 2012,

01:46:16.820 | we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine.

01:46:19.620 | And he's always, you know, I think,

01:46:20.820 | been kind of steeped in that whole view of Russian history.

01:46:23.060 | I mean, I heard at that time, I was in,

01:46:25.100 | I've written about this in many of the things that,

01:46:27.020 | you know, I've written about Putin,

01:46:28.580 | that in that same timeframe,

01:46:30.060 | I'm going to all these conferences in Russia

01:46:31.620 | where Putin is and Peskov, his press secretary,

01:46:35.460 | and they talk about him reading Russian history.

01:46:37.740 | I think it's this, in this kind of period,

01:46:38.980 | that he formulates this idea

01:46:40.740 | of the necessity of reconstituting the Russian world,

01:46:46.700 | the Russian empire.

01:46:48.580 | He's obviously been very interested in this.

01:46:50.180 | He's always said, of course,

01:46:51.420 | that the collapse of the Soviet Union

01:46:52.700 | was the great catastrophe of the 20th century,

01:46:54.100 | but also the collapse of the Russian empire before it.

01:46:56.940 | And he starts to be critical about Lenin and the Bolsheviks,

01:46:59.380 | and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine

01:47:02.300 | as the same country,

01:47:05.860 | Ukrainians and Russians being one and the same.

01:47:07.940 | And this is where the ledger flips,

01:47:09.260 | because, I mean, the initial question you asked me

01:47:10.620 | is about, well, has Putin been good for Russia or not?

01:47:14.380 | And this is where we get into the focal point of,

01:47:17.500 | or the point where he's not focusing

01:47:20.180 | on the prosperity and stability and future of Russia,

01:47:23.820 | but he starts to obsess about the past

01:47:26.900 | and start to take things in a very different direction.

01:47:30.420 | He starts to clamp down at home

01:47:32.100 | because of the rise of opposition

01:47:35.060 | and the fact that he knows that his brand

01:47:38.620 | is not the same as it was before,

01:47:40.340 | and his popularity is not the same as it was before,

01:47:42.660 | because he's already gone over that period

01:47:45.700 | in anybody's professional and political life

01:47:49.580 | that if you stay around long enough,

01:47:50.860 | people get a bit sick of you.

01:47:52.740 | It's just, we talked about that before.

01:47:53.940 | Should you stay kind of in any job

01:47:55.660 | for a long period of time, you need refreshing.

01:47:57.820 | And Putin is starting to look like

01:48:00.540 | he's going to be there forever,

01:48:01.500 | and people are not happy about that,

01:48:03.540 | and would like the chance as well to move on and move up,

01:48:06.660 | and with him in still in place,

01:48:08.180 | that's not going to be particularly possible.

01:48:11.140 | And that's around the time when he starts

01:48:12.740 | to make that decision of annexing Crimea,

01:48:14.660 | and that's when the whole thing flips, in my view.

01:48:18.140 | The annexation of Crimea in 2014 is the beginning of the end

01:48:22.820 | of Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia,

01:48:27.820 | because if you pay very close attention

01:48:31.740 | to his speech on the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014,

01:48:36.740 | you see all of the foreshadowing of where we are now.

01:48:41.700 | It's already of kind of his view of kind of his obsessions,

01:48:44.460 | his historical obsessions, his view of himself

01:48:46.780 | as being kind of fused with the state,

01:48:48.380 | a kind of a modern czar,

01:48:49.860 | and his idea that the West is out to get him,

01:48:51.740 | and it becomes after that,

01:48:53.100 | almost a kind of like a messianic mission,

01:48:55.940 | to turn things in a different direction.

01:48:58.380 | - And who are the key people to you

01:49:03.100 | in this evolution of the human being of the leader?

01:49:08.100 | Is it Petr Shchev?

01:49:10.220 | Is it Shoygu, the Minister of Defense?

01:49:12.140 | Is it, like you mentioned, Peskov, the Press Secretary?

01:49:15.380 | What role do some of the others like Lavrov play?

01:49:19.260 | - I think it's more rooted in the larger context.

01:49:21.100 | I mean, individuals matter in that context,

01:49:22.900 | but it's just kind of like this shared worldview.

01:49:25.500 | And if you go back to the early 1990s,

01:49:27.220 | immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union,

01:49:29.380 | when Yeltsin and his counterparts in Ukraine, Belarus,

01:49:34.380 | pull it apart, there was an awful lot of people

01:49:36.500 | who wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, not just Putin.

01:49:40.620 | I mean, you remember after Gorbachev

01:49:42.980 | tried to have the new union treaty in 1991,

01:49:47.500 | and there was the emergency committee set up,

01:49:49.580 | the coup against Gorbachev.

01:49:51.220 | It was because they were worrying he was going too far

01:49:53.100 | and unraveling the union then as well.

01:49:55.780 | They were opposed to his reforms.

01:49:58.220 | There's always been a kind of a very strong

01:50:00.620 | nationalist contingent that become Russian nationalists

01:50:03.060 | over time rather than Soviet hardliners,

01:50:06.900 | who basically want to maintain the empire,

01:50:09.860 | the union in some form.

01:50:11.700 | And in the very early part of the 1990s,

01:50:13.900 | there was a lot of pressure put on Ukraine

01:50:15.780 | and all the other former Soviet republics,

01:50:18.020 | now independent states, by people around,

01:50:21.060 | Mayor Lushkov, for example, in Moscow,

01:50:24.260 | by other forces in the Russian Duma,

01:50:26.940 | not just Vladimir Zhirinovsky and others,

01:50:28.820 | but really serious, kind of what we would call here,

01:50:32.500 | like right-wing nationalist forces.

01:50:35.140 | But it's pervasive in the system,

01:50:38.420 | and it's especially pervasive in the KGB

01:50:41.060 | and in the security sector.

01:50:42.940 | And that's where Putin comes out of.

01:50:45.340 | Remember Putin also was of the opinion

01:50:47.620 | that one of the biggest mistakes the Bolsheviks made

01:50:49.780 | was getting rid of the Orthodox Church

01:50:53.300 | as an instrument of the state.

01:50:55.460 | And so there's this kind of restorationist wing

01:50:57.900 | within the security services and the state apparatus

01:51:01.420 | that want to kind of bring back Russian Orthodoxy

01:51:03.940 | as a state instrument, an instrument of state power.

01:51:07.060 | And they were kind of looking all the time

01:51:08.980 | about strengthening the state,

01:51:11.980 | the executive, the presidency.

01:51:14.780 | And so it's everybody who takes part in that.

01:51:17.820 | And it's also others who want power, honestly,

01:51:19.900 | and they see Putin as their vehicle for power.

01:51:22.660 | I think people like Sergei Kiryanko,

01:51:24.220 | I knew Kiryanko back in the '90s.

01:51:26.500 | I mean, my God, that guy's all in.

01:51:28.140 | Or like Dmitry Medvedev,

01:51:30.220 | you know, who was a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin,

01:51:33.540 | certainly had a totally different perspective,

01:51:34.980 | wasn't in the KGB.

01:51:35.820 | - Did you say warmer, fuzzier version?

01:51:37.660 | - A warmer, fuzzier version, yeah.

01:51:38.700 | I mean, he's kind of like,

01:51:39.660 | he was literally a warm personality.

01:51:41.700 | I don't know if you watched him

01:51:42.660 | during the September 30th annexation,

01:51:44.380 | the guy had all kinds of facial twitches

01:51:46.420 | and looked so rigid and stiff

01:51:47.980 | that he looks like he might implode.

01:51:50.580 | I mean, that wasn't how he was earlier in his career.

01:51:53.580 | And he had a different view of Perestroika.

01:51:56.180 | We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia

01:51:58.660 | during Perestroika, he was in Dresden,

01:52:00.500 | watching the East German state fall apart.

01:52:04.380 | And dealing with the Stasi

01:52:05.940 | and in a kind of place where

01:52:07.460 | you weren't getting a lot of information

01:52:08.820 | about what was happening in West Germany

01:52:10.300 | or even what was happening back home in Perestroika.

01:52:13.140 | And he has that kind of group of people around him,

01:52:15.380 | the Patrushevs and Botnikovs and others,

01:52:18.220 | and Sergei Ivanov and others,

01:52:20.740 | from the different configurations of his administration,

01:52:25.460 | who have come out of that same kind of mindset

01:52:27.940 | and are kind of wanting to put everything

01:52:30.140 | back together again.

01:52:31.100 | So there's a lot of enablers,

01:52:32.300 | there's a lot of power seekers,

01:52:35.260 | and there are a lot of people who

01:52:36.700 | think the same as him as well.

01:52:38.700 | He is a man of his times, a man of his context.

01:52:42.660 | - You as a top advisor yourself and a scholar of Putin,

01:52:47.300 | do you think, actually now in his inner circle,

01:52:51.580 | are there people he trusts?

01:52:52.980 | - There are people he trusts for some things,

01:52:55.300 | but I don't think there's people he trusts for everything.

01:52:56.980 | I don't think he's the kind of person

01:52:57.820 | who tells anyone everything at all.

01:53:00.260 | I don't think he's got somebody who deeply confides in.

01:53:02.500 | No, I think he compartmentalizes things.

01:53:06.220 | He's often said that the only person he trusts is himself.

01:53:08.900 | And I think that's probably true.

01:53:09.900 | He's the kind of person who keeps his own counsel.

01:53:12.100 | I mean, people talk about Kovalchuk, for example,

01:53:14.860 | or some of the other people who are friends with him

01:53:18.540 | that go back to his time in St. Petersburg.

01:53:21.900 | At various points, he seemed to spend a lot of time,

01:53:25.340 | way back when, talking to people who are,

01:53:28.100 | people think of kind of more moderating forces

01:53:30.100 | like Alexei Kudrin,

01:53:31.220 | but doesn't seem to be interacting with them.

01:53:35.060 | There are obviously aspects of his personal life.

01:53:37.220 | Does he speak to his daughters?

01:53:40.300 | Does he speak to kind of lovers,

01:53:45.140 | kind of in a way people speculate about,

01:53:48.060 | who might he confide in?

01:53:49.380 | But I would greatly doubt

01:53:50.300 | that he would have deep political discussions with them.

01:53:53.340 | He's a very guarded, very careful person.

01:53:57.420 | - What about sources of information then?

01:53:59.580 | So trust a deep understanding about military strategies

01:54:06.180 | for certain conflicts, like the war in Ukraine,

01:54:08.620 | or even special subsets of the war in Ukraine,

01:54:13.420 | or any kind of military operations,

01:54:15.940 | getting clear information?

01:54:16.780 | - I think he's deeply suspicious of people

01:54:20.060 | and of information.

01:54:21.660 | And I think part of the problems

01:54:26.540 | that we see with Putin now,

01:54:28.780 | I mean, I've come from isolation during COVID.

01:54:32.700 | I'm really convinced that, like many of us,

01:54:35.460 | a lot of Putin's views have hardened.

01:54:39.660 | And the way that he looks at the world

01:54:41.780 | have been shadowed in very dark ways

01:54:45.260 | by the experience of this pandemic.

01:54:47.900 | Obviously, he was in a bubble,

01:54:50.220 | different kind of bubble from most of us.

01:54:51.780 | I mean, most of us are not in bubbles

01:54:53.180 | with multiple kind of palaces and kind of the Kremlin.

01:54:57.500 | But we've seen so much,

01:54:59.260 | obviously a lot of this is staged, that isolation,

01:55:02.140 | or they're kind of making it very clear

01:55:03.180 | that he's the czar,

01:55:04.180 | the guy who is in charge, making all the decisions,

01:55:06.620 | one end of the table and everybody else is at the other end.

01:55:09.500 | But it's very difficult then to bring information to him

01:55:13.380 | in that way.

01:55:14.220 | He used to have a lot of information bundled for him

01:55:17.020 | in the old days by the presidential administration.

01:55:19.140 | I mean, I know that because it was a lot more open

01:55:21.020 | in the past.

01:55:21.860 | And I've had a lot of meetings

01:55:23.060 | with people in the presidential administration

01:55:25.220 | who brought outside,

01:55:26.460 | would say all source information for him,

01:55:29.060 | kind of funneled in information from different think tanks

01:55:32.860 | and different viewpoints

01:55:35.380 | and maybe a kind of more eclectic,

01:55:38.420 | diversified set of information.

01:55:40.340 | He would meet with people.

01:55:41.660 | You've heard all the stories

01:55:42.740 | about where he had once called up Masha Gessen

01:55:45.980 | and had to come in.

01:55:47.500 | Obviously, a very different character

01:55:50.460 | as a journalist and a critic.

01:55:52.940 | We've heard about Benediktor from Ekho Moskvy,

01:55:55.780 | the radio program, the editor,

01:55:58.580 | who Putin would talk to and consult with.

01:56:02.260 | He'd reach out.

01:56:03.620 | People like Lyudmila Alexeeva, for example,

01:56:07.100 | the head of Memorial, he had some respect for her

01:56:09.260 | and would sometimes just talk to her, for example.

01:56:12.460 | All of that seems to have come to a halt.

01:56:15.100 | - Can you explain why?

01:56:16.860 | - I think a lot of us worry,

01:56:18.220 | I mean, us who watch Putin,

01:56:20.140 | about what kind of information is he getting?

01:56:22.700 | Is it just information that he's seeking

01:56:24.460 | and gathering himself

01:56:25.540 | that fits into his worldview and his framework?

01:56:27.660 | We're all guilty of that, of looking for things.

01:56:30.140 | It gets to our social media preferences.

01:56:32.580 | Are people just bringing to him things

01:56:33.980 | that they think he wants to hear?

01:56:35.300 | Like the algorithm,

01:56:36.700 | kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard.

01:56:38.540 | Or is he himself tapping into a source of information

01:56:42.220 | that he absolutely wants?

01:56:43.780 | And remember, he is not a military guy.

01:56:46.980 | He's an operative and he was sort of trained in operations

01:56:49.660 | and contingency planning.

01:56:51.340 | Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister,

01:56:53.900 | as a civil engineer,

01:56:54.900 | was the former minister of emergencies.

01:56:56.940 | He wasn't a military planner.

01:56:58.500 | You know, somebody like Gerasimov,

01:57:00.540 | the head of the chiefs of staff,

01:57:04.660 | maybe a military guy, in this case, from the army,

01:57:08.180 | but he's also somebody who's in a different part,

01:57:10.380 | the chain of command.

01:57:11.220 | He's not somebody who would spontaneously start

01:57:14.260 | telling Putin things.

01:57:16.420 | And Putin comes out of the FSB,

01:57:18.780 | out of the KGB of the Soviet era,

01:57:21.380 | and he knows the way that intelligence

01:57:23.100 | get filtered and works.

01:57:24.100 | He's probably somebody who wants

01:57:24.940 | to consume raw intelligence.

01:57:26.460 | He doesn't probably want to hear anybody else's analysis.

01:57:30.020 | And he's thrived in the past of picking things up from people.

01:57:34.020 | You know, I've taken part in all of these meetings

01:57:35.780 | with him, gone for hours,

01:57:36.620 | 'cause he's just collecting.

01:57:37.980 | He's collecting information.

01:57:39.220 | He's sussing people out.

01:57:40.460 | He wants to know the questions they ask.

01:57:42.260 | He learns something about the questions that people ask,

01:57:44.540 | the way that they ask them.

01:57:46.180 | You know, so he's kind of soliciting information himself.

01:57:48.820 | And if he's cut off from that information,

01:57:51.420 | you know, because of circumstances,

01:57:53.660 | then, you know, how is he formulating things in his head?

01:57:56.540 | And again, getting into, you can't get into his head,

01:57:59.340 | but you can understand the context in which he's operating.

01:58:02.340 | And that's where you worry,

01:58:03.260 | because he clearly made this decision to invade Ukraine

01:58:06.780 | behind the back of most of his security establishment.

01:58:09.500 | - You think so?

01:58:12.500 | - Oh, I think it's pretty apparent.

01:58:14.260 | - Oh, what, what would the security establishment,

01:58:18.700 | what would be the--

01:58:19.540 | - Well, that would be the larger, you know,

01:58:20.420 | thinking of the funneling in information

01:58:21.940 | from the presidential administration,

01:58:24.020 | from the National Security Council.

01:58:25.660 | It looks like, you know,

01:58:26.500 | he made that decision with a handful of people.

01:58:28.380 | And then, you know,

01:58:29.220 | having worked in these kinds of environments,

01:58:31.140 | and it's not that dissimilar,

01:58:32.580 | you filter information up.

01:58:34.540 | So think about, you know,

01:58:35.700 | you and I are talking for hours here.

01:58:37.580 | If you were my, you know, basically,

01:58:41.980 | you know, senior official, and I'm your briefer,

01:58:45.420 | I might only get 20 minutes with you.

01:58:47.900 | And you might be just like, you know,

01:58:49.140 | looking at your watch the whole time and thinking,

01:58:51.060 | hang on a second, I've got to go,

01:58:52.260 | and I've got this meeting, and I've got that meeting.

01:58:54.140 | And yeah, your point, you're not going to wait there.

01:58:56.780 | So I give this long explanation,

01:58:58.860 | I've got to get to the point.

01:59:00.060 | And then I've got to then choose for myself,

01:59:02.220 | what's the information I'm going to impart to you?

01:59:04.380 | Out of the 20 things that I think are important,

01:59:07.260 | you know, okay, I've got 20 minutes,

01:59:08.780 | maybe I only get two minutes.

01:59:10.500 | Maybe, you know, you get called out,

01:59:12.860 | and somebody, you know, kind of interrupts,

01:59:15.220 | something happens, I'm going to get one minute, two minutes.

01:59:18.260 | I mean, I once remember,

01:59:19.340 | I had to give a presentation when I was in government.

01:59:21.340 | - It's too real.

01:59:22.180 | - You know, to Henry Kissinger,

01:59:23.900 | you know, for that defense policy board.

01:59:26.140 | And we planned bloody weeks on this thing.

01:59:28.380 | You know, PowerPoints were created,

01:59:30.300 | teams of people were brought together.

01:59:32.740 | And, you know, people were practicing this,

01:59:34.580 | we had all these, you know, different people there.

01:59:36.740 | And I said, look, Henry Kissinger's an academic

01:59:39.220 | and a former professor, and, you know,

01:59:40.980 | I happened to, you know, I've got to watch him in action.

01:59:43.420 | He's going to like, you know, five seconds in,

01:59:46.820 | if we're lucky we get that far,

01:59:48.740 | ask us a question,

01:59:49.740 | and just throw off our entire presentation.

01:59:51.700 | What is it that we want to convey?

01:59:52.940 | And that's exactly what happened.

01:59:54.540 | And then, you know, people aren't really prepared

01:59:56.420 | what they wanted to convey.

01:59:57.380 | And they, you know, they prepared a, you know,

01:59:59.700 | a nice sort of fulsome, you know, PowerPoint-like approach.

02:00:02.900 | We never even got there.

02:00:04.540 | And so God knows what, you know,

02:00:05.820 | he took away from it at the end of it.

02:00:07.420 | And that's, you know, think about Putin.

02:00:09.300 | He's going to be kind of impatient.

02:00:11.340 | He's, you know, we see the televised things where he,

02:00:13.700 | you know, kind of sits at a table a bit like, you know,

02:00:15.980 | people won't necessarily see us here.

02:00:17.860 | And he puts his hands on the table

02:00:19.100 | and he looks across at the person and he says,

02:00:20.620 | "So, tell me, you know,

02:00:23.700 | what's the main things I need to know?"

02:00:25.060 | And of course the person's mind probably goes blank,

02:00:27.500 | you know, with the kind of the thought of like,

02:00:29.620 | oh God, what's the main thing?

02:00:31.300 | And they go, and they start,

02:00:32.140 | well, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

02:00:33.620 | And, you know, they start the kind of, you know,

02:00:36.420 | they're revving up, you know, to get to the point,

02:00:38.380 | and then he cuts them off.

02:00:39.700 | So you think about that,

02:00:41.020 | and then you think about,

02:00:41.860 | well, what information has he got?

02:00:43.700 | And then how does he process it?

02:00:45.540 | And is he suspicious of it?

02:00:47.020 | Does he not believe it?

02:00:48.180 | And what inside of his own history then, you know,

02:00:51.860 | leads him to make one judgment over another?

02:00:53.860 | He clearly thought the Ukrainians

02:00:55.820 | would fall apart in five seconds.

02:00:57.460 | - We don't know if he clearly thought that,

02:01:00.260 | but that there was a high probability maybe?

02:01:04.900 | I mean, you can guess.

02:01:05.940 | - I think he pretty much thought it,

02:01:07.340 | because I think he thought that, you know,

02:01:08.820 | kind of his Zelensky wasn't very popular.

02:01:11.020 | There was an awful lot of, you know, pro-Russian sentiment

02:01:14.100 | in whatever way he thinks that is,

02:01:15.740 | because people are Russian speakers,

02:01:17.580 | and that, you know, they're kind of, you know,

02:01:19.500 | in polling, you know, they expressed affinity with Russia.

02:01:22.820 | I mean, certainly in Crimea,

02:01:25.100 | that worked out because a majority of the population

02:01:27.980 | had, you know, higher sentiments

02:01:30.260 | or feelings of affinity with Russia.

02:01:32.460 | And, you know, obviously, you know,

02:01:34.060 | that kind of, they got traction there.

02:01:36.300 | But it's more complicated.

02:01:37.300 | We talked about Donbass before,

02:01:38.580 | about being a kind of melting pot,

02:01:40.220 | when, you know, they tried the same thing in Donbass,

02:01:43.140 | Donetsk and Luhansk,

02:01:43.980 | 'cause they tried in Crimea in 2014,

02:01:45.460 | it didn't kind of pan out.

02:01:46.540 | In fact, you know, a whole war broke out.

02:01:49.460 | They tried, you know, to kind of in,

02:01:51.260 | you know, many of the major cities

02:01:54.140 | that are now under attack, including Odessa,

02:01:56.220 | to kind of foment, you know, pro-Russian movements,

02:01:58.900 | and they completely and utterly fell apart.

02:02:01.380 | So Putin was thinking,

02:02:03.380 | you know, I'm pretty sure based on polling

02:02:05.180 | and the FSB having infiltrated, you know,

02:02:07.860 | an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchies

02:02:10.180 | we're now seeing is quite apparent

02:02:11.660 | with some of the dismissals in Ukraine.

02:02:14.140 | He was pretty sure that, you know,

02:02:16.340 | kind of he would get traction,

02:02:19.100 | and that it would be like 1956 in Hungary

02:02:21.660 | or 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

02:02:23.260 | Remember, he comes out of the Andropov levy,

02:02:26.500 | as it's called, the kind of cohort of people

02:02:28.740 | who come into the KGB under Yuri Andropov,

02:02:32.220 | and Yuri Andropov has presided

02:02:33.660 | over a lot of these anti-dissident,

02:02:36.100 | you know, kind of movements inside of Russia itself

02:02:38.180 | and how you suppress opposition,

02:02:40.300 | but also over, you know, how you deal with,

02:02:43.100 | you know, kind of the uprisings in,

02:02:45.700 | you know, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

02:02:47.700 | And there's all these lessons from this that,

02:02:49.380 | you know, you can put everything back in the box.

02:02:51.820 | And yeah, there might be a bit of violence

02:02:53.140 | and a bit of fighting, but ultimately,

02:02:55.020 | you think you've got the political figures

02:02:56.900 | and you decapitate the opposition.

02:02:58.780 | So they thought Zelensky would run away,

02:03:01.980 | Yadokovich ran away, but, you know,

02:03:04.260 | that was kind of a bit, you know,

02:03:05.740 | sort of a different set of circumstances.

02:03:08.580 | And they thought that all of the local governments

02:03:10.540 | would, you know, kind of capitulate

02:03:11.900 | because they had enough Russians

02:03:13.580 | and inverted commas in there.

02:03:15.260 | Again, mistaking language and, you know,

02:03:19.020 | kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity

02:03:21.700 | or how people would react in the time

02:03:23.700 | and not understanding people's, you know,

02:03:25.900 | linkages and, you know, kind of importance of place,

02:03:29.060 | the way that people feel about who they are

02:03:31.180 | in a certain set of circumstances and place.

02:03:34.180 | - But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022

02:03:38.420 | is unlike anything that he was ever involved with.

02:03:43.420 | - I don't think he thought it would be, you know,

02:03:45.900 | because it's this kind of, if he looks back into the past,

02:03:48.260 | you're right though, he wasn't involved in '68 or '56

02:03:52.340 | or what happened in the 1980s in Poland.

02:03:54.340 | - But there's a very wide front and it's the capital.

02:03:57.620 | And I mean, this isn't going for-

02:04:00.220 | - This isn't Chechnya or this isn't, you know,

02:04:01.980 | kind of Syria or, for example, yeah.

02:04:03.820 | - This is a major nation.

02:04:05.140 | - Exactly.

02:04:05.980 | - Like a large, it's large, the size.

02:04:08.060 | - It was more like Afghanistan,

02:04:09.420 | but they didn't realize that because again,

02:04:11.500 | Ukrainians are us.

02:04:12.700 | There's this kind of inability to think

02:04:15.740 | that people might think differently

02:04:17.820 | and might want something different.

02:04:19.780 | And that 30 years of independence

02:04:21.980 | actually has an impact on people and their psyches.

02:04:24.380 | And if I look back to the 1990s,

02:04:27.300 | I mean, I remember being in seminars

02:04:28.900 | and at Harvard at the time,

02:04:30.500 | and we were doing a lot of research on, you know,

02:04:33.700 | what was happening in, you know,

02:04:35.980 | the former Soviet Union at the time,

02:04:37.540 | because the early 1990s,

02:04:38.700 | just after the, you know, the whole place fell apart.

02:04:41.380 | And there was already under Yeltsin,

02:04:43.540 | this kind of idea of Russians abroad,

02:04:46.300 | Russians in the near abroad, Russian speakers,

02:04:48.180 | and the need to bring them back in.

02:04:49.940 | And I remember, you know, we had seminars at the time

02:04:53.020 | where we talked about at some point,

02:04:54.900 | there'd be some people in Russia

02:04:56.420 | that would actually believe that

02:04:58.020 | those Russian speakers needed to be brought back into Russia,

02:05:01.500 | but that the people who spoke Russian might have moved on

02:05:04.540 | because they suddenly had other opportunities

02:05:06.460 | and other windows on the world.

02:05:08.100 | I mean, look what's happened in Scotland.

02:05:09.540 | You know, for example, most people in Scotland speak English.

02:05:13.540 | The Scottish language is not the standard bearer

02:05:17.340 | of Scottish identity.

02:05:18.540 | There's just, it's almost a civic identity,

02:05:20.740 | different identity than not just national identity,

02:05:23.100 | just like you see in Ukraine.

02:05:24.740 | And there's lots of English people

02:05:26.180 | that have moved to Scotland

02:05:27.140 | and now think of themselves as Scottish,

02:05:28.460 | or Brazilians or Italians,

02:05:29.940 | and, you know, all kinds of people who've moved in there.

02:05:32.420 | I mean, it's a smaller population,

02:05:33.660 | obviously, and it's not the scale of Ukraine,

02:05:36.020 | but, you know, people feel differently.

02:05:39.580 | And there's been a devolution of power.

02:05:41.620 | And when Brexit happened, you know,

02:05:43.860 | Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all.

02:05:45.700 | They wanted to kind of still be, you know,

02:05:47.620 | having a window on Europe.

02:05:49.700 | And that's kind of historic.

02:05:51.260 | And lots of people in Ukraine have looked West, not East.

02:05:54.860 | You know, it depends on where you are,

02:05:56.340 | not just in Lviv, you know, or somewhere like that,

02:05:59.980 | but also in Kiev.

02:06:01.060 | And Kharkiv, you know,

02:06:02.300 | was kind of predominantly a Russian-speaking city,

02:06:04.740 | but Kharkiv was also the center of Ukrainian culture

02:06:08.500 | and Ukrainian literature, you know, at different points.

02:06:11.060 | People have different views.

02:06:12.540 | I grew up in the North of England.

02:06:13.580 | We don't feel like the South of England.

02:06:15.060 | There's been a massive divide

02:06:16.580 | between North and South in England for millennia,

02:06:19.300 | not just centuries.

02:06:20.740 | So, you know, people feel differently

02:06:22.940 | depending on where they live and, you know,

02:06:24.460 | kind of where they grew up.

02:06:25.620 | And Putin just didn't see that.

02:06:28.060 | He didn't see that.

02:06:28.900 | - Well, hold on a second.

02:06:29.980 | Let me sort of push back at the fact

02:06:33.660 | that I don't think any of this is obvious.

02:06:36.100 | So first of all, Zelensky before the war was unpopular.

02:06:39.980 | - Oh, he was, what was it, 38%, something like that?

02:06:42.140 | But best in the popularity, yeah.

02:06:44.620 | - Let me sort of make the case

02:06:46.540 | that the calculation here is very difficult.

02:06:50.900 | If you were to poll every citizen of Ukraine

02:06:55.100 | and ask them, "What do you think happens if Russia invades?"

02:06:58.420 | Just like, actually, put each individual Ukrainian

02:07:03.380 | in a one-on-one meeting with Putin

02:07:05.100 | and say, "What do you think happens?"

02:07:07.300 | I honestly think most of them will say,

02:07:10.300 | they will agree with the prediction

02:07:12.660 | that the government will flee, it would collapse,

02:07:15.140 | and the country won't unite around the cause

02:07:20.140 | because of the factions,

02:07:21.820 | because of all the different parties involved,

02:07:23.740 | because of the unpopularity of the president.

02:07:24.580 | - You might have said the same thing about the Soviet Union

02:07:27.740 | when Hitler invaded in 1941.

02:07:32.100 | - You see, the problem is Putin always reads history

02:07:34.340 | from one perspective over another.

02:07:36.340 | I think most countries basically rise to their own defense.

02:07:41.340 | So this is actually one of the first times

02:07:44.140 | that Russia has been on the offensive

02:07:46.700 | rather than on the defensive.

02:07:48.180 | So there's kind of a bit of a flip there.

02:07:52.580 | I mean, obviously Afghanistan,

02:07:55.020 | but that was more complicated

02:07:56.460 | 'cause it was also supposed to be an intervention, right?

02:07:58.460 | I mean, it wasn't supposed to be to annex Afghanistan.

02:08:00.740 | It was to try to prop up,

02:08:03.740 | kind of a reinstall a leader there.

02:08:07.100 | Syria, you were in there to help your guy, Bashar al-Assad,

02:08:11.860 | turn away the opposition.

02:08:13.420 | Chechnya was a debacle.

02:08:15.220 | The Chechens fought back big time.

02:08:18.780 | And it was only by dint of horrible, violent persistence

02:08:23.780 | and ruthlessness and nasty, dirty tricks

02:08:28.620 | that Putin prevailed there.

02:08:31.580 | But then you wonder, did he prevail?

02:08:33.540 | Because what happened?

02:08:35.380 | Chechnya sometimes describes the most independent part

02:08:37.780 | of the Russian Federation.

02:08:38.700 | And Ramzan Kadyrov plays power games in Moscow.

02:08:42.620 | Yeah, his predecessors,

02:08:44.580 | even his father and others wouldn't have done that.

02:08:47.420 | Ahmed Kadyrov, and before that, Dudayev and Maskhadov.

02:08:51.260 | I mean, they were willing to make a compromise,

02:08:53.020 | but they wouldn't have had the same position

02:08:56.820 | that Kadyrov has had.

02:08:58.860 | So, I think that, again, it's your perspective

02:09:01.780 | and where you stand and which bit of history

02:09:04.220 | you start to read.

02:09:05.100 | And that's why I said that, I think Putin,

02:09:07.940 | it's again, it's the information,

02:09:09.100 | the way that he processes it.

02:09:10.700 | I think most Russians also can't believe

02:09:12.860 | that they've done something wrong in Ukraine.

02:09:14.820 | I mean, maybe at this point things are changing a bit,

02:09:17.700 | but that's why there was so much kind of support for this

02:09:21.220 | in a right way.

02:09:22.060 | I mean, I have Russian friends again,

02:09:22.900 | I said, but look what was happening in Donetsk.

02:09:25.060 | Look what was the Ukrainians were doing to our guys.

02:09:28.340 | Look what was happening to Russian speakers.

02:09:31.980 | We were defenders.

02:09:34.140 | We were not, we're not invaders.

02:09:37.380 | I think, again, the special military operation idea.

02:09:40.100 | Now I think it's flipping, obviously,

02:09:41.820 | in the way that with the war going on there.

02:09:44.420 | But Putin wasn't kind of looking at what would happen.

02:09:47.500 | I mean, most of the kind of glory parts of Russian history,

02:09:51.540 | when you kind of go in,

02:09:53.180 | you chase Napoleon back to Paris,

02:09:55.380 | or you chase the Germans back to Berlin,

02:09:57.620 | you put the flag above the Reichstag.

02:09:59.740 | That's a very different set of affairs.

02:10:02.500 | When you've been fighting a defensive one,

02:10:03.940 | you've been invaded from a war where you invade someone else.

02:10:07.780 | And even the most fractured populations,

02:10:12.660 | like you had in the Soviet Union at the point,

02:10:14.340 | rally around and, you know, World War I, that fell apart.

02:10:18.100 | I mean, the Tsar didn't manage to rally everybody around.

02:10:21.820 | I mean, the whole thing fell apart.

02:10:24.060 | And World War II, Stalin had to, you know, revive nationalism,

02:10:28.740 | including in the republics in Central Asia and elsewhere,

02:10:32.500 | to revive nationalism.

02:10:33.860 | And Ukraine suddenly found nationalism,

02:10:37.500 | you know, in a kind of sense of--

02:10:38.580 | - That's really interesting, because it's not obvious,

02:10:41.540 | especially what Ukrainians went through in the 1930s.

02:10:46.060 | It's not obvious that that, I mean,

02:10:48.380 | my grandfather was Ukrainian,

02:10:50.260 | and he was proud to fight a Ukrainian Jew.

02:10:55.260 | He was proud to fight and willing to die for his country.

02:11:00.260 | It wasn't like--

02:11:01.660 | - His country then was the Soviet Union.

02:11:03.380 | - The Soviet Union, right.

02:11:04.500 | Sorry, to clarify.

02:11:05.340 | - But he might fight now for his country, Ukraine.

02:11:08.020 | - Yes, but I'm just like lingering on the point you made.

02:11:12.860 | It was not obvious that that united feeling would be there.

02:11:17.820 | - No, and again, it wouldn't have been obvious

02:11:20.020 | with the Soviet Union.

02:11:21.300 | - That's what, sorry.

02:11:22.140 | - Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

02:11:23.180 | - Sorry, I was referring to my grandfather

02:11:24.580 | with the Soviet Union.

02:11:25.420 | We're both saying the exact same thing.

02:11:26.740 | - Yeah, we know, yeah, we are.

02:11:27.580 | We're saying the same thing. - You're saying it's a really

02:11:28.860 | powerful thing, 'cause I take it,

02:11:30.700 | 'cause you take history as it happened,

02:11:33.300 | you don't realize it could have happened differently.

02:11:35.300 | It's kind of, it's fascinating.

02:11:37.260 | - It's that whole counterfactual, right?

02:11:38.780 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

02:11:39.620 | Because I mean, if you've kind of,

02:11:40.980 | that's why we all need in the United States

02:11:43.180 | to really examine our own history,

02:11:45.740 | because, you know, there's a lot of lessons from that,

02:11:48.780 | that we should treat very cautiously.

02:11:51.260 | It doesn't mean that history repeats or even rhymes,

02:11:53.660 | you know, it's the old axiom all the time,

02:11:56.300 | but there are a lot of things

02:11:58.260 | that you can take away differently

02:11:59.980 | from putting a different perspective

02:12:03.300 | in a different slant on the same set of events.

02:12:05.380 | I mean, I always used to wonder, like,

02:12:06.500 | how many books can be written on the French Revolution,

02:12:08.580 | or even on the Russian Revolution?

02:12:10.100 | You know, I studied with Richard Pipes.

02:12:11.700 | I remember he was really offended

02:12:12.980 | after he'd written his great "Magnus Opus"

02:12:14.620 | on the Russian Revolution, two volumes,

02:12:16.020 | that other people would, you know,

02:12:17.380 | kind of write about the Russian Revolution.

02:12:18.620 | He said, "I've written it all."

02:12:19.500 | And I thought, well, actually, maybe you haven't.

02:12:21.900 | It's like, that might be some completely different angle there

02:12:24.380 | that you haven't really thought of, and that's Putin.

02:12:26.420 | You know, I remember Peskov saying,

02:12:28.260 | "Putin reads history all the time, Russian history,"

02:12:30.460 | and I thought, well, maybe he should read some world history.

02:12:32.740 | You know, maybe he should, you know,

02:12:34.460 | kind of read some European authors on Russian history,

02:12:38.140 | not just, you know, reading Lamanossa for, you know,

02:12:41.460 | Russian historians on Russian history,

02:12:44.060 | because you might see something

02:12:45.180 | from a very different perspective.

02:12:46.740 | And look, in the United States,

02:12:47.580 | the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam, right?

02:12:50.900 | I mean, they saw Vietnam as kind of weak,

02:12:53.100 | manipulated by, you know, kind of external forces,

02:12:56.260 | China, Soviet Union,

02:12:58.260 | but the Vietnamese fought for their own country.

02:13:01.340 | They suddenly became Vietnamese,

02:13:03.620 | and Ho Chi Minh became, you know,

02:13:05.580 | kind of basically a kind of a wartime fighter and leader,

02:13:09.260 | you know, in a way that, you know,

02:13:10.380 | perhaps people wouldn't have understood either.

02:13:13.140 | - You said the United States

02:13:14.540 | made a massive mistake in Vietnam,

02:13:17.860 | and that, for some reason, sprung a thought in my head.

02:13:21.660 | Has the United States, since World War II,

02:13:24.860 | had anything that's not a mistake

02:13:28.020 | in terms of military operations abroad?

02:13:32.020 | I suppose all the ones that are successes,

02:13:37.140 | we don't even know about, probably,

02:13:39.060 | so it's like very fast military operations.

02:13:42.100 | - I mean, Korea's divided.

02:13:43.300 | I mean, I don't know if it's successful,

02:13:44.620 | but, you know, kind of, I mean,

02:13:46.020 | there was a solution found that, you know,

02:13:48.020 | some people are promoting, you know,

02:13:49.380 | in this case as well, of a sort of division,

02:13:51.220 | and, you know, the DMZ, and, you know,

02:13:53.900 | one side over the other,

02:13:55.100 | and, you know, kind of perpetuating a division,

02:13:56.860 | which I think is particularly successful.

02:13:59.140 | But if you think about World War I and World War II,

02:14:01.500 | the United States came in, you know,

02:14:03.980 | under some very specific sets of circumstances.

02:14:06.420 | In World War I, they did kind of come in

02:14:07.900 | to help, you know, kind of liberate, you know,

02:14:10.580 | parts of Europe, France, and, you know,

02:14:12.340 | kind of the UK, and, you know, everything else,

02:14:15.060 | Great Britain, and the war towards the end of it.

02:14:17.780 | World War II, you know, there was that whole debate

02:14:20.460 | about whether the United States

02:14:21.540 | should even be part of the war.

02:14:23.380 | I mean, we know it wasn't thought to, you know,

02:14:25.580 | overturn the Holocaust, and all of the kind of things

02:14:27.660 | you'd kind of wish it would have been fought for,

02:14:29.660 | but it was because of Pearl Harbor,

02:14:30.900 | and, you know, the Japanese pulling in.

02:14:32.900 | But, I mean, ultimately, it was easy to explain

02:14:37.220 | why you were there, you know,

02:14:38.260 | particularly after Pearl Harbor and what had happened.

02:14:40.500 | It was harder to explain Vietnam and Korea,

02:14:42.380 | and, you know, many of the other wars,

02:14:43.620 | and that's kind of going to be a problem for Putin,

02:14:45.420 | and that's why there is a problem for Putin.

02:14:47.380 | All of his explanations have been questioned,

02:14:51.820 | you know, sort of off on NATO, or this,

02:14:54.020 | or that, or the other, and, you know,

02:14:56.260 | kind of liberating, you know, Ukraine from Nazis,

02:14:59.380 | or, you know, kind of basically stopping

02:15:01.500 | the persecution of Russian speakers,

02:15:03.500 | and all of this has now got lost

02:15:05.940 | in just this horrific destruction.

02:15:08.820 | And that's what happened in Vietnam, as well.

02:15:11.460 | It became, you know, a great degradation

02:15:15.500 | of the Russian military, with atrocities

02:15:17.540 | and people wondering why on earth

02:15:19.380 | the United States was in Vietnam.

02:15:22.100 | I mean, even that kind of happened in Britain

02:15:23.860 | in their colonial, you know, kind of period, as well.

02:15:26.260 | Why was the United Kingdom doing, you know,

02:15:28.980 | committing atrocities and, you know,

02:15:30.300 | kind of basically fighting these colonial wars?

02:15:33.100 | Northern Ireland, why was the United Kingdom

02:15:36.020 | still, you know, kind of militarily occupying Ireland?

02:15:41.020 | Cyprus, there's all kinds of, you know,

02:15:42.460 | instances where we look at this thing,

02:15:43.820 | because what Russia is doing now,

02:15:45.420 | Putin is trying to occupy another country,

02:15:49.260 | irrespective of, you know, kind of the historical linkages,

02:15:52.300 | and, you know, the kind of the larger meta-narratives

02:15:54.700 | that he's trying to put forward there.

02:15:56.580 | - What role did the United States play

02:16:02.100 | in the lead-up and the actual invasion

02:16:05.180 | of Ukraine by Russia?

02:16:09.220 | A lot of people say that, I mean,

02:16:11.460 | obviously Vladimir Putin says that part of the reason

02:16:16.380 | the invasion had to happen is because of security concerns

02:16:19.940 | over the expansion of NATO,

02:16:22.100 | and there is a lot of people that say

02:16:26.220 | that this was provoked by NATO.

02:16:29.260 | Do you think there's some legitimacy to that case?

02:16:32.340 | - Look, I think the whole situation here

02:16:34.380 | is very complicated, and you have to take

02:16:36.060 | a much longer view than, you know,

02:16:37.500 | what happened in, you know, 2008

02:16:39.540 | with the opened door for Ukraine and Georgia,

02:16:41.620 | which actually, by the way,

02:16:42.460 | I thought was a strategic blunder, just to be very clear,

02:16:45.020 | because there wasn't any kind of thinking through

02:16:46.340 | about what the implications of that would be,

02:16:48.420 | and, you know, what it actually would mean

02:16:49.540 | for Ukraine's security, and also bearing in mind

02:16:52.460 | what, you know, Putin had already said

02:16:53.900 | about NATO expansion, they came on the wake

02:16:57.220 | of the recognition by the United States

02:16:59.260 | pretty unilaterally of Kosovo,

02:17:01.100 | and it also comes in the wake,

02:17:02.460 | as I mentioned before, the invasion of Iraq,

02:17:04.740 | which really is very important

02:17:08.700 | for understanding Putin's psyche.

02:17:11.460 | So I think, you know, we have to go back,

02:17:13.060 | you know, much further than it's not just talking

02:17:15.100 | about kind of NATO and what that means.

02:17:18.140 | NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine

02:17:21.500 | going in a different direction from Russia,

02:17:23.740 | just as so is the European Union.

02:17:25.140 | Remember, the annexation of Crimea comes after Ukraine

02:17:29.940 | has sought an association agreement

02:17:32.020 | with the European Union, not with NATO

02:17:34.660 | at that particular point, even though, you know,

02:17:36.380 | the EU on the security, common security and defence policy

02:17:39.380 | basically has all kinds of connections with NATO,

02:17:44.660 | you know, various different levels

02:17:45.700 | in the European security front.

02:17:46.860 | It was all about Europe, and going on a different economic

02:17:50.300 | and political and ultimately legal path,

02:17:53.220 | because if you have an association agreement,

02:17:56.460 | eventually you get into the acquis communitaire,

02:17:58.500 | and it just transforms the country completely,

02:18:00.300 | and Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet period

02:18:03.340 | or the Russian Empire period.

02:18:04.700 | It becomes, you know, on a different trajectory

02:18:06.980 | like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, you know,

02:18:11.980 | another country, it becomes a different place.

02:18:14.580 | It moves into a different space, and that's part of it.

02:18:17.380 | But if you go back again to the period

02:18:20.380 | at the very beginning of the 1990s,

02:18:22.700 | after the dissolution of the Soviet Union,

02:18:25.740 | where there's no discussion about NATO at that point

02:18:27.820 | and NATO enlargement, there was a lot of pressure again,

02:18:30.860 | as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine,

02:18:33.620 | trying to bring it back in the fold,

02:18:35.540 | and wanting to make what was then, you know,

02:18:37.900 | this mechanism for divorce, more of a mechanism

02:18:41.380 | for re-managed Commonwealth of Independent States.

02:18:43.980 | And in the early 1990s, when Ukraine

02:18:49.780 | became an independent state, it inherited

02:18:51.460 | that nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union.

02:18:54.500 | Basically, whatever was stationed or positioned

02:18:57.180 | in Ukrainian territory at the time became Ukraine's,

02:19:00.380 | strategic and, you know, kind of basically intermediate

02:19:02.940 | and tactical nuclear weapons.

02:19:04.780 | And, you know, in the United States at the time,

02:19:06.660 | you know, we had all this panic about

02:19:08.900 | what was gonna happen with all of that.

02:19:10.020 | So, I mean, I think, you know, as a scientist

02:19:11.620 | and, you know, kind of technically,

02:19:13.220 | it would have been difficult for Ukraine to actually use this.

02:19:15.740 | I mean, the targeting was, you know, done centrally.

02:19:18.620 | They were actually stationed there, but nonetheless,

02:19:20.860 | Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan,

02:19:22.500 | suddenly became nuclear powers.

02:19:24.500 | And, you know, Ash Carter, the former US defense secretary

02:19:28.380 | who's just died tragically, and Dave was talking about,

02:19:32.460 | you know, talking together today,

02:19:35.620 | was part of a whole team of Americans and others who,

02:19:39.580 | you know, tried to work with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan

02:19:41.820 | to get them to give up the nuclear weapons.

02:19:44.500 | And back in the early period of that, '93, '94,

02:19:50.500 | you go back, and I mean, I was writing about this

02:19:52.420 | at the time, I wrote a report called

02:19:53.700 | "Back in the USSR," which is, you know,

02:19:55.340 | kind of on the website of the Kennedy School

02:19:57.020 | with some other colleagues.

02:19:58.380 | And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations

02:20:01.740 | coming out of Moscow, the defense ministry

02:20:04.980 | and the Duma, the parliament and others,

02:20:07.060 | that Ukraine was trying to find a way of making a dirty bomb,

02:20:10.060 | using its nuclear weapons, you know, becoming a menace,

02:20:13.220 | and, you know, kind of Ukraine

02:20:14.540 | might have to be brought to order.

02:20:16.780 | So a lot of the dynamics we're seeing now

02:20:18.300 | were happening then, irrespective of NATO.

02:20:21.420 | Basically, the problem was always Ukraine getting away.

02:20:25.700 | Yeltsin himself, when he unraveled the Soviet Union,

02:20:28.260 | didn't really want it to unravel,

02:20:29.940 | but he didn't have the wherewithal to bring,

02:20:31.820 | you know, the countries back again.

02:20:32.780 | Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

02:20:35.500 | Its economy imploded.

02:20:37.580 | It had to give sovereignty to all of these

02:20:39.300 | constituent parts of the Russian Federation

02:20:42.020 | in terms of a sort of devolution of authority.

02:20:43.740 | It had the war in Chechnya,

02:20:44.980 | which Yeltsin stupidly sparked off in 1994.

02:20:49.500 | You had Tatarstan, one of the regions,

02:20:51.700 | the all-rich regions, you know,

02:20:53.700 | basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow.

02:20:58.660 | You had the whole place was kind of seemed like

02:21:00.220 | it was falling apart so that, you know,

02:21:01.900 | you couldn't do anything on Ukraine

02:21:03.900 | because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it.

02:21:05.580 | And then when, you know, kind of basically Russia

02:21:07.780 | starts to get its act back together again,

02:21:10.340 | all of these security nationalist types

02:21:14.340 | who had never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova

02:21:16.780 | or anywhere else to kind of move away,

02:21:18.340 | they didn't worry that much about Central Asia, to be frank,

02:21:20.340 | but they did want, you know,

02:21:22.140 | the core states in their view to come back.

02:21:25.220 | And Moldova was part of that, even if it's not Slavic.

02:21:27.500 | But, you know, they wanted Belarus and northern Kazakhstan

02:21:30.900 | and probably Kazakhstan as well,

02:21:32.260 | which wasn't really thought about being part of Central Asia,

02:21:34.340 | back in the fold as close as possible.

02:21:36.860 | So anything that gave those countries an alternative

02:21:41.620 | was seen as negative.

02:21:43.460 | And it could have been an association with China,

02:21:46.940 | you know, of them joining, you know,

02:21:48.500 | kind of an association with Latin America or Africa

02:21:51.260 | or something else like that.

02:21:52.340 | But of course, NATO has all of those larger connotations

02:21:54.780 | of it being, you know, the Cold War opposing entity.

02:21:58.980 | And Putin has always seen NATO

02:22:01.340 | as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact,

02:22:04.060 | which is, in other words,

02:22:05.180 | just something dominated completely by the United States.

02:22:08.900 | Now, that, of course, is why getting back to Trump again,

02:22:10.860 | Trump was always going, you know, to the Europeans,

02:22:12.740 | if this is really supposed to be collective security

02:22:14.820 | and a mutual defense pact, why are you guys not paying?

02:22:17.500 | You know, why does the United States pay for everything?

02:22:19.940 | But, you know, NATO was actually conceived

02:22:21.780 | as collective defense, you know, mutual security.

02:22:25.780 | And it was set up by, you know, the United States,

02:22:28.300 | along with the UK and France and, you know,

02:22:30.900 | Germany and Turkey and, you know, other countries.

02:22:33.740 | And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden.

02:22:36.940 | They didn't have to join NATO.

02:22:38.700 | They didn't want to join NATO for a long time.

02:22:40.340 | They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel

02:22:42.140 | and the other countries partner with NATO.

02:22:44.860 | But once they thought that their security was really at risk,

02:22:46.860 | they wanted to be part of it.

02:22:48.900 | And so, you know, kind of, you're now really seeing,

02:22:51.180 | you know, that NATO was something other than just being,

02:22:54.820 | you know, a creature or an instrument of the United States.

02:22:58.060 | But that's how Putin always saw it.

02:22:59.980 | So, you know, what this debate about NATO is all about,

02:23:03.860 | or Russia being provoked,

02:23:06.460 | is wanting to kind of return to an old superpower,

02:23:09.980 | bipolar relationship, where everything is negotiated

02:23:13.180 | with the United States.

02:23:14.900 | It's to try to deny that Ukraine or Belarus,

02:23:17.420 | well, Belarus has kind of been absorbed by this point,

02:23:19.620 | you know, by Russia or Moldova or Kazakhstan

02:23:22.380 | or any of the other countries have any kind of agency,

02:23:25.380 | not even Poland or Hungary or, you know,

02:23:28.020 | kind of France and Britain.

02:23:30.020 | For years and years and years,

02:23:32.780 | senior people like Putin and people around the Kremlin

02:23:36.460 | have demanded a return to the kind of what they call

02:23:38.980 | the old concert of Europe or the concert of Vienna,

02:23:41.460 | where the big guys,

02:23:43.260 | which now means the United States and Russia,

02:23:46.380 | just sit down and thrash everything out.

02:23:48.900 | And so, I mean, Putin by saying,

02:23:51.020 | "Look, it was provoked.

02:23:52.300 | It's the United States, it's NATO.

02:23:54.300 | It's a proxy war, or it's this or it's that,

02:23:56.860 | or this is gonna be a nuclear confrontation.

02:23:58.940 | It's like the Cuban missile crisis

02:24:00.220 | or it's the Euromissile crisis."

02:24:01.580 | It's basically just saying, you know,

02:24:03.500 | "I want to go back to when the Soviet Union

02:24:06.100 | and the United States worked things out.

02:24:07.740 | I want to go back to the whole, you know,

02:24:09.580 | period of the 1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan

02:24:11.620 | just kind of got together and figured things out."

02:24:13.860 | Or, even better, back to Yalta, Potsdam, and Tehran

02:24:18.860 | and the big, you know, meetings at the end of World War II

02:24:22.820 | where we resolved the whole future security.

02:24:24.900 | We've had a war, we've had the Cold War.

02:24:26.540 | Now we've got another war.

02:24:27.500 | We've got a real war, a hot war.

02:24:28.740 | We've got a war in Ukraine.

02:24:30.260 | It should be the United States and Russia

02:24:32.420 | that sort this out."

02:24:33.900 | So this is where we see the United States

02:24:35.780 | waffling about as well,

02:24:36.900 | trying to kind of like figure out how to handle this

02:24:38.700 | because it has to be handled in a way

02:24:41.500 | that Ukraine has agency.

02:24:43.060 | Because if Ukraine doesn't have agency,

02:24:44.380 | nobody else has agency either.

02:24:45.700 | Nobody else has any kind of decision-making power.

02:24:48.660 | And, you know, we have an environment

02:24:50.420 | in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players.

02:24:53.380 | There's the United States and Russia and China.

02:24:56.460 | And maybe occasionally it might be India

02:24:58.140 | and perhaps Brazil or some other,

02:25:00.100 | South Africa or some other country,

02:25:01.500 | like maybe the BRICS at some point.

02:25:03.660 | But, you know, ultimately it's like the old days,

02:25:06.540 | big powers resolve everything.

02:25:08.140 | And so this war is also about Russia's right, Putin's right,

02:25:12.860 | you know, to determine things,

02:25:14.820 | you know, strong man to strong man,

02:25:16.420 | big country to big country,

02:25:18.500 | and, you know, determine, you know,

02:25:20.100 | where things happen next.

02:25:21.420 | That's why he's talking about things being provoked

02:25:23.380 | and it's being the United States' fault.

02:25:25.180 | - But aren't there parts of the United States establishment

02:25:29.300 | that likes that kind of three-party view of the world?

02:25:34.020 | - Oh, there's always going to be people

02:25:35.700 | who like that part, that approach.

02:25:38.220 | Of course there is.

02:25:39.340 | But then they don't necessarily dominate.

02:25:41.180 | That's the kind of thing that people kind of think about.

02:25:43.220 | I mean, you know, Putin can, you know,

02:25:45.460 | read, you know, all the various articles

02:25:47.780 | and hear the kind of pronouncements of people.

02:25:49.700 | But, you know, this gets back to, you know,

02:25:51.940 | the way that the United States operates.

02:25:54.500 | You know, Putin saw that, you know,

02:25:56.300 | Trump wanted to have a, you know,

02:25:57.700 | top-down, you know, vertical of power.

02:26:00.700 | And other presidents have wanted to have that.

02:26:02.300 | But the United States is a pretty messy place.

02:26:04.660 | And we have all kinds of different viewpoints.

02:26:06.660 | Now, of course, we know that in Russia,

02:26:08.740 | everything, even criticism of the Kremlin

02:26:10.380 | is usually fairly orchestrated,

02:26:12.420 | usually to kind of flesh out, you know,

02:26:14.420 | what people think about things.

02:26:15.700 | When we had these hardliners saying, you know,

02:26:17.500 | we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less,

02:26:20.300 | and that, you know, the army wasn't doing enough,

02:26:22.340 | it was in many respects, you know,

02:26:23.540 | kind of encouraged by the Kremlin

02:26:25.180 | and to see how people would react to that.

02:26:27.100 | You know, to kind of actually create a constituency

02:26:29.620 | for, you know, being more ruthless

02:26:31.700 | than you had before because, you know,

02:26:33.300 | they wanted to clamp down.

02:26:34.500 | In the United States, I mean, I can say whatever I want.

02:26:37.580 | It doesn't mean that I'm speaking

02:26:38.540 | on behalf of the White House.

02:26:40.740 | And, you know, even if I have been an advisor

02:26:43.100 | to this president, that president, and the other,

02:26:44.980 | it doesn't mean I'm, you know,

02:26:46.140 | basically speaking on behalf of the US government.

02:26:49.220 | But there's kind of always an assumption from the Russians

02:26:51.380 | that, you know, when people, you know, say this

02:26:54.540 | and people do advocate one thing over another,

02:26:56.780 | that they're, you know, it's operating,

02:26:59.140 | there's a lot of mirror imaging,

02:27:00.620 | thinking that, you know, we're operating

02:27:02.340 | in the same kind of way.

02:27:03.420 | So yes, there are, of course, constituencies

02:27:06.340 | who think like that and would love it.

02:27:07.700 | You know, to go back to that,

02:27:08.540 | and there are many people out there

02:27:09.740 | with their own peace plans.

02:27:11.460 | All kinds of people, you know, out there

02:27:13.260 | trying to push this. - Yeah, but there does seem

02:27:14.980 | to be the engine of the military-industrial complex

02:27:18.140 | seems to give some fuel to the hawks

02:27:21.300 | and they seem to create momentum in government.

02:27:26.300 | - Yeah, but other people do too.

02:27:27.860 | I mean, there's always, you know,

02:27:28.900 | kind of a checksum in again.

02:27:30.980 | - You believe in the tension of ideas.

02:27:32.660 | - I think there is a lot of tension.

02:27:34.500 | I mean, I've seen it.

02:27:35.340 | I've seen it inside of the government now, you know,

02:27:36.900 | and people can push back and that's why I speak out

02:27:39.220 | and I try to lay it out so that everybody can,

02:27:41.380 | you know, kind of figure it out for themselves.

02:27:43.020 | I said the same to you as I say to everybody.

02:27:45.420 | This is how I see the situation.

02:27:47.780 | And, you know, this is, you know,

02:27:48.940 | how we can analyze it here.

02:27:50.860 | Now, look, do I think that we've handled, you know,

02:27:53.740 | the whole Russia account, you know, for years?

02:27:56.700 | Well, no, we haven't.

02:27:58.620 | I mean, we've taken our eyes off the ball many times.

02:28:02.100 | We've failed to understand the way

02:28:03.340 | that people like Putin think.

02:28:05.260 | You know, you talked earlier about, you know,

02:28:07.020 | we need to have empathy for, you know,

02:28:08.420 | all the people who like Trump or like Biden

02:28:10.780 | and somehow they think we've got to have

02:28:12.460 | strategic empathy about Putin as well.

02:28:14.420 | We've got to understand how the guy thinks

02:28:16.300 | and why he thinks like he does.

02:28:18.900 | You know, he has got his own context

02:28:21.020 | and his own frame and his own rationale.

02:28:24.100 | And he is rational.

02:28:25.060 | He is a rational actor in his own context.

02:28:27.860 | And we've got to understand that.

02:28:28.740 | We've got to understand that he would take offense

02:28:30.620 | at something and he would take action over something.

02:28:33.100 | It doesn't mean to say that, you know,

02:28:34.740 | we are necessarily to blame by taking actions,

02:28:37.980 | but we are to blame when we don't understand

02:28:39.900 | the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly

02:28:43.740 | or, you know, take preventative action

02:28:45.540 | or recognize that something might happen

02:28:47.740 | as a result of something.

02:28:49.300 | - So you've been in the room with Putin.

02:28:51.340 | Let me ask you for some advice.

02:28:55.220 | And it's also just a good philosophical question

02:28:57.900 | for you or for me.

02:28:59.140 | If I have a conversation with Vladimir Putin right now,

02:29:01.980 | can you advise on what questions, topics,

02:29:04.500 | ideas to talk through to him as a leader,

02:29:07.460 | to him as a human?

02:29:08.820 | What would you like to understand about his mind,

02:29:11.060 | about his thinking?

02:29:12.140 | - Yeah, remember what I said before

02:29:16.980 | that Putin always tries to, you know, reverse things.

02:29:19.820 | He wants to hear the questions that people have.

02:29:23.900 | Because remember, he himself at different points

02:29:27.500 | has been a recruiter, which is, you know,

02:29:29.060 | the way that you're operating now as well, right?

02:29:31.140 | You're asking an awful lot of questions.

02:29:32.900 | Your questions also betray, you know,

02:29:34.580 | often the times where you're thinking about things,

02:29:37.460 | you know, the kind of context.

02:29:38.940 | You know, kind of any kind of dialogue like this

02:29:43.180 | reveals a lot about the, you know, the other person.

02:29:46.380 | And I've actually often, you know,

02:29:48.300 | noticed in these settings that Putin likes

02:29:50.460 | to have a lot of give and take.

02:29:52.140 | So I think he would actually enjoy having a conversation,

02:29:54.300 | you know, with you.

02:29:55.500 | But again, he would always be trying to influence you,

02:30:00.500 | inform and influence.

02:30:02.220 | That's kind of, you know,

02:30:03.060 | part of the way that he always operates.

02:30:05.780 | So what you would have to, you know,

02:30:07.460 | be trying to think about,

02:30:08.340 | so what is it you would want to elicit information from him?

02:30:11.420 | You're trying to understand the guy's worldview.

02:30:13.780 | And what we're trying to also understand

02:30:15.420 | is if there's any room there

02:30:17.380 | where he might compromise on something.

02:30:20.180 | You know, so if your goal was to go in there,

02:30:22.220 | you know, to talk about Ukraine at this particular moment,

02:30:25.260 | I mean, one of the problems that I've often seen

02:30:28.860 | in the sort of the meetings we've had with Putin

02:30:30.380 | just ends up in sort of mutual recriminations.

02:30:32.820 | You know, kind of, no, well, what about what you've done?

02:30:36.500 | Or no, you've done that about, you know,

02:30:38.220 | and there's always this whataboutism.

02:30:40.860 | I mean, it often say, well,

02:30:43.100 | you're saying that I've done this, but you've done that.

02:30:45.780 | The United States invaded Iraq.

02:30:47.540 | What's the difference between, you know,

02:30:48.980 | what I'm doing and all of the things

02:30:50.860 | that you've been doing here?

02:30:52.980 | I mean, what you would have to try to do

02:30:54.540 | is kind of elicit information about why,

02:30:57.780 | or what he is thinking about this particular moment in time

02:31:00.700 | and why he thinks it.

02:31:01.820 | - Yeah, the whataboutism is a failure case.

02:31:06.940 | I think that shows from all the interviews I've seen

02:31:10.580 | that with him, that just shows that he doesn't trust

02:31:13.260 | the person on the other side.

02:31:14.580 | - No, he doesn't.

02:31:15.620 | - Right, but I'm not cynical like people

02:31:18.860 | because they seem to think he's some kind of KGB agent

02:31:22.980 | that doesn't trust anybody.

02:31:24.340 | I disagree.

02:31:25.180 | I think everybody's human.

02:31:27.380 | And from my perspective, I'm worried about what I've seen

02:31:32.380 | is I think whether it's COVID,

02:31:35.380 | whether it's other aspects that I'm not aware of

02:31:40.380 | leading up to the invasion,

02:31:42.820 | he seems to be less willing to have

02:31:45.820 | charismatic back and forth dialogue.

02:31:48.620 | - Yeah, an open discussion.

02:31:50.020 | Actually, I said, you asked me before

02:31:51.700 | about that issue of trust,

02:31:53.500 | and he often says he only trusts himself.

02:31:55.940 | And I said, he's often distrustful of people,

02:31:59.740 | but he does trust some people for certain things

02:32:02.500 | where he knows it's within their competence.

02:32:04.700 | So he has people he trusts to do things

02:32:09.460 | 'cause he knows they'll do them

02:32:10.900 | and he knows that they'll do them well,

02:32:12.620 | which is why he has his old buddies from St. Petersburg

02:32:16.820 | 'cause he's known them for a very long time

02:32:18.300 | and he knows that they won't try to pull a fast one over him,

02:32:21.460 | but he also knows their strengths and their weaknesses

02:32:23.980 | and what they can be trusted to do.

02:32:25.260 | I mean, he's learning that some of the people in the military

02:32:27.700 | that he thought were competent

02:32:29.700 | or people on other things are not, right?

02:32:31.860 | And he tends to actually have a lot of loyalty

02:32:35.140 | to people as well.

02:32:36.340 | Or he also kind of thinks it's best to keep them

02:32:38.100 | inside the tent than outside.

02:32:39.940 | And he moves them around.

02:32:41.340 | He kind of, okay, he gives them multiple chances

02:32:44.460 | to redeem themselves if they don't.

02:32:46.100 | It's not like he has them done in.

02:32:47.740 | I mean, yeah, there is a lot of that in the system,

02:32:49.780 | but the people that he's worked with for a long time,

02:32:52.060 | he moves them around to something else,

02:32:53.780 | perhaps where they can do less harm.

02:32:55.180 | Although we've often see that he has quite a small cadre

02:32:59.460 | of people that he's reliant on

02:33:00.940 | and they're not up to the task,

02:33:02.780 | which is kind of what's happening here.

02:33:04.820 | But he also, in the past, has been more straightforward,

02:33:08.620 | just like he was saying here, more pragmatic.

02:33:10.980 | And I think if you engaged with him in Russian,

02:33:15.340 | well, you're actually literally speaking the same language

02:33:17.740 | 'cause there's so much lost in translation.

02:33:20.100 | I used to jump outside of my skin

02:33:21.940 | listening to some of the phone calls

02:33:23.900 | because the way that they kind of relayed

02:33:26.740 | with an interpreter--

02:33:27.780 | - Oh, 'cause you're listening to the translation?

02:33:29.900 | - No, 'cause I know I'm listening to the Russian

02:33:31.220 | and the translation, which is happening in real time.

02:33:34.500 | And having been at a translators' institute,

02:33:36.500 | it's really difficult.

02:33:37.740 | Look, an interpreter's a trend in the moment

02:33:40.060 | to do something, the synchroni privo,

02:33:42.900 | the synchronized or the real-time translation.

02:33:47.900 | So translation is an art as well as a skill.

02:33:51.460 | If you're doing simultaneous translation,

02:33:54.500 | that's the word in English,

02:33:55.580 | synchroni privo in Russian,

02:33:58.180 | you're kind of focused in the moment

02:33:59.900 | on the fragments of the discussion,

02:34:01.940 | trying to render it as accurately as you possibly can.

02:34:05.620 | And when you come out of that,

02:34:06.660 | you can't relay the entire conversation.

02:34:10.140 | And often, what translators do is they take

02:34:12.420 | this little short-hand note like journalists do.

02:34:14.780 | And afterwards, they've just been caught up in the moment

02:34:18.140 | and they haven't got the big picture.

02:34:20.260 | Consecutive translation is different.

02:34:22.500 | Kind of you're trying to convey the whole mood

02:34:25.140 | of big chunks of dialogue that have already been there.

02:34:28.140 | But sometimes you might not get that right either.

02:34:30.740 | And it breaks up the flow of the discussion.

02:34:33.460 | - Right, it's terrible.

02:34:34.620 | - And often, it's kind of the person who translates,

02:34:37.940 | it's different.

02:34:39.020 | Some of our best translators are women.

02:34:41.220 | But hearing a woman's voice translating a guy

02:34:44.620 | who has a particular guy's way of speaking,

02:34:47.660 | and a macho way of speaking, and a crude way of speaking,

02:34:51.300 | be that Putin, or I've seen that happen with Erdogan,

02:34:54.580 | the president of Turkey,

02:34:56.300 | and it gets translated by a much more refined female speaker,

02:35:00.220 | you've just lost the whole thing.

02:35:02.660 | And many of the translators on the Russian side

02:35:05.820 | are not competent in English

02:35:07.900 | in the way that you would hope they are.

02:35:09.340 | It's not just that they're not native speakers,

02:35:11.340 | they're just not trained to the same high standards

02:35:13.060 | they used to be in the past.

02:35:15.140 | And you lose the nuance, you lose the feel.

02:35:19.180 | You almost need the interpretive actor

02:35:22.740 | doing the interpretations.

02:35:26.420 | You need to match it as much as you can

02:35:28.180 | in the way that you do voiceovers in film.

02:35:31.020 | The best way to talk to Putin

02:35:33.580 | is one-on-one in his own language.

02:35:37.620 | And I have a really great friend here

02:35:39.660 | who is one of the best interpreters,

02:35:41.620 | and Putin is often asked by the media to interpret for him.

02:35:46.620 | He was at the Institute that I was at,

02:35:48.860 | I mean, I know him from that kind of period.

02:35:51.420 | And he is just excellent,

02:35:52.500 | just like Pavel Polashenko was absolutely phenomenal

02:35:55.220 | at interpreting Gorbachev.

02:35:56.300 | Now, he didn't always interpret him accurately

02:35:58.540 | 'cause Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaffes,

02:36:00.900 | and sometimes Gorbachev himself would joke

02:36:03.940 | that Polashenko spoke better for Gorbachev

02:36:06.340 | than Gorbachev could himself.

02:36:07.900 | But Putin is actually quite precise

02:36:09.740 | and careful in the way that he speaks

02:36:11.620 | because there's a lot of menace sometimes

02:36:13.060 | to things deliberately,

02:36:13.900 | other times there's lots of humor,

02:36:15.380 | and he's telling a joke for a particular reason.

02:36:18.060 | And a lot of it is, I mean,

02:36:19.100 | he actually uses the richness of the Russian language

02:36:21.300 | and the crudity of language

02:36:22.660 | that can't be conveyed in English.

02:36:23.500 | - And also facial expressions that go along with it.

02:36:24.820 | - Yeah, facial expressions, body language,

02:36:26.860 | the way that he sits back in the chair and slouches,

02:36:29.580 | the kind of the way that he makes fun of people

02:36:31.780 | and he kind of uses irony.

02:36:33.900 | Just some of it is just lost and it needs to be conveyed.

02:36:36.620 | - The depth of humor and wit,

02:36:39.060 | I've met quite a few political leaders like that

02:36:42.740 | and they speak only Russian when I was traveling in Ukraine.

02:36:45.740 | I don't know how you translate that.

02:36:50.500 | I think it's almost,

02:36:51.780 | the other person that reminds me like that a little bit

02:36:54.140 | is Obama.

02:36:54.980 | Obama had a wit and an intelligence,

02:36:58.940 | but he would smile as he said something

02:37:02.940 | that add a lot to it.

02:37:04.780 | That he's trolling you or he's being sarcastic.

02:37:09.180 | Me converting into words.

02:37:11.580 | It's obvious that all English speakers,

02:37:13.420 | if they listen to Obama,

02:37:14.940 | but if you had to translate to a different language,

02:37:16.780 | I think you're gonna lose a lot of that.

02:37:17.900 | - Yeah, I mean, when I watched the,

02:37:19.860 | I mean, I watched many of Putin's speeches,

02:37:22.580 | just in Russian,

02:37:23.420 | not looking at any of the subtitles or anything.

02:37:26.020 | And it's just watching the way that his body language is

02:37:28.420 | at the time when he's saying things,

02:37:30.220 | the way that you smirk, he'll sneer,

02:37:32.500 | he'll laugh, he'll ad lib,

02:37:35.420 | kind of from something that obviously kind of,

02:37:37.140 | wasn't there on the prepared speech.

02:37:39.860 | And it's really critical.

02:37:41.220 | And kind of a lot, some people speak,

02:37:43.500 | like Trump, it's just needs kind of just words.

02:37:48.100 | Putin, the words are very important.

02:37:52.220 | Trump, it's the atmosphere.

02:37:53.380 | It's the kind of the way you feel about things.

02:37:55.260 | It's the buzz you get, it's revving people up.

02:37:57.980 | It's the kind of slogans and Putin,

02:38:00.820 | he's conveying a lot.

02:38:02.420 | - And what he's saying there.

02:38:03.260 | - But I think, I mean, of course I don't know much

02:38:05.540 | 'cause I only speak Russian and English,

02:38:07.580 | but I have in English or Russian have not met

02:38:11.220 | almost anyone ever as interesting in conversation as Putin.

02:38:17.180 | I think he shines not in speeches,

02:38:21.220 | but in interactions with others.

02:38:23.180 | - Yeah, when you watch those interviews and things with him,

02:38:25.020 | and I've been at many of these sessions,

02:38:26.820 | it's been hours of him parrying questions.

02:38:29.580 | And it's like watching a boxer sparring

02:38:33.220 | in a kind of training bout.

02:38:35.220 | Yeah, come on, give me another one.

02:38:36.700 | You know, and it's kind of like, and he prides himself.

02:38:38.700 | And he's made mistakes often,

02:38:42.740 | but the breadth of the issues that he's often covered

02:38:45.660 | has been fascinating.

02:38:47.340 | And I used to just take, you know,

02:38:49.620 | kind of really detailed notes about this

02:38:51.220 | because you learn a ton.

02:38:52.940 | But it's also about his worldview again.

02:38:54.940 | I mean, he does live in a certain box, like we all do.

02:38:59.660 | And, you know, again, his world experience

02:39:02.060 | is not as extensive as, you know,

02:39:04.060 | you would hope it would be.

02:39:05.540 | But that's why you have to really pay attention.

02:39:07.340 | That's where we've messed up.

02:39:09.460 | That's where we haven't really paid a lot of attention

02:39:11.900 | to what he's been saying.

02:39:13.700 | He's been telegraphing this grievance,

02:39:17.980 | this dissatisfaction, this,

02:39:20.260 | I'm gonna do something for years.

02:39:22.260 | - And the thing is during war time,

02:39:28.180 | the combined with propaganda

02:39:31.380 | and the narratives of resentment and grievance

02:39:35.060 | that you dig in on those.

02:39:37.620 | Like maybe you start out not believing it,

02:39:40.700 | but you're sure it's all gonna believe it eventually.

02:39:43.500 | - Well, you convince yourself over time.

02:39:45.300 | Yeah, look, the longer you're in a position like Putin,

02:39:49.060 | 22 years now, coming from 23 years,

02:39:51.700 | could be out there for 36 years.

02:39:54.540 | You become more and more rigid.

02:39:56.540 | I mean, this is, again, you know,

02:39:57.740 | something that you see in history.

02:39:59.460 | You know, you look at people through history

02:40:01.740 | have moved from kind of being kind of left wing

02:40:03.860 | and in their perspectives to hard right.

02:40:08.100 | They kind of have a,

02:40:09.180 | but kind of a sort of an ossification

02:40:10.940 | or a rigidity emerges in their views.

02:40:12.500 | I mean, again, I used to have these arguments

02:40:14.340 | with Professor Pius about Lenin,

02:40:16.140 | 'cause he would talk about Lenin.

02:40:17.180 | I said, "But he didn't change his mind from being 18.

02:40:19.340 | "Have you not thought about that?"

02:40:20.340 | I mean, it's like,

02:40:21.180 | we're not formed, fully formed individuals at 18.

02:40:25.220 | You know, we don't know anything.

02:40:26.500 | We know something, but not everything.

02:40:27.940 | I mean, obviously the younger context,

02:40:30.100 | you know, the kind of the way that you kind of grow up,

02:40:31.780 | the place you grew up,

02:40:32.620 | the things that happened to you, the traumas you have.

02:40:34.620 | I mean, all of these have an impact.

02:40:36.260 | But then if you don't grow beyond all of that,

02:40:38.420 | and Putin's been stuck in place since 2000,

02:40:41.180 | when he became president.

02:40:42.220 | He's not out and about, you know,

02:40:43.780 | kind of being a man of the people.

02:40:46.180 | You know, he's not doing the kind of things

02:40:48.740 | that he used to do.

02:40:49.580 | Yeah, he gets out there and he goes to Kazakhstan

02:40:51.220 | and, you know, Tajikistan,

02:40:53.180 | and he goes to China and he does this and that.

02:40:55.700 | And then to COVID, he didn't go anywhere.

02:40:57.420 | I mean, very few places.

02:40:59.100 | And so he's got stuck.

02:41:00.740 | And that worries me a lot,

02:41:03.100 | because you could see before that he, you know,

02:41:04.860 | had a bit more of flexibility of thought.

02:41:07.580 | And that's why nobody should be in place forever.

02:41:09.580 | You should always kind of like get out there

02:41:11.220 | and go out there and learn a new skill.

02:41:13.260 | You know, kind of, he needs some,

02:41:15.340 | he needs to sort of, you know,

02:41:16.180 | he needs to get out more and do something different.

02:41:18.020 | - You had an interesting point you've made

02:41:19.620 | that both Vladimir Zelensky and Putin

02:41:24.100 | are thinking about, they're just politicians.

02:41:28.740 | They're thinking about the 2024 election,

02:41:31.340 | which is coming up for both of them.

02:41:32.700 | - Yeah, I've said that in some of the other interviews.

02:41:34.100 | Yeah, that's true.

02:41:34.940 | - That's so interesting.

02:41:36.500 | I mean, I--

02:41:37.340 | - 'Cause their election's gonna be pretty much

02:41:38.540 | at the same time.

02:41:39.620 | - As the US election also.

02:41:41.220 | - Oh, there's gonna be before.

02:41:42.300 | I mean, 'cause it's sometime in that, you know,

02:41:43.820 | early part of the year for the presidential election.

02:41:46.100 | - Yeah, and also, I don't know if you know

02:41:47.660 | about US elections,

02:41:48.700 | but they actually last way longer than a year.

02:41:51.260 | - We're in it now, aren't we?

02:41:52.180 | You know, already.

02:41:53.020 | - We're already starting.

02:41:54.580 | So there's gonna be a significant overlap.

02:41:56.740 | - Yeah, you know, you're right.

02:41:58.660 | - Do you think that actually comes into play

02:42:00.700 | in their calculus?

02:42:02.460 | - I think it was one of the reasons

02:42:03.980 | why Putin invaded in February of 2022,

02:42:06.740 | 'cause it was gonna be two years.

02:42:07.860 | I mean, he thought it'd be over by March of 2022,

02:42:09.860 | and he got two years to prepare for, you know, the election.

02:42:12.580 | And he got a big boost, you know, not only,

02:42:14.260 | he got a boost from Crimea.

02:42:15.460 | I mean, I didn't mention that before.

02:42:16.580 | I mean, one of the reasons for invading Crimea

02:42:18.980 | and annexing or invading Ukraine the first time

02:42:21.340 | and annexing Crimea was, look what happened to his ratings.

02:42:24.100 | They went from kind of declining,

02:42:25.900 | and they were still pretty good, you know,

02:42:27.220 | by anybody's standards,

02:42:28.100 | to just rocketing off into the stratosphere.

02:42:30.260 | I mean, I didn't really meet anybody in Russia

02:42:32.140 | who thought that annexing Crimea was, you know,

02:42:34.700 | kind of a bad thing.

02:42:36.300 | I mean, even, you know, kind of people who opposed Putin

02:42:38.340 | on so many other things.

02:42:39.300 | Crimea was, you know, "Krim nash," they kept saying.

02:42:41.620 | You know, this is kind of, you know, we got it back.

02:42:44.260 | You know, it should never have gone away.

02:42:45.660 | It was ours, you know, but, you know, this is more complex.

02:42:49.300 | And he wasn't, I don't think at the time,

02:42:51.340 | planning on annexing all of Ukraine

02:42:53.500 | when he went in this special military operation.

02:42:55.380 | He was going to try to turn it into what Belarus has become,

02:42:58.060 | you know, part of a, you know,

02:42:59.700 | bring back the Commonwealth of Independent States

02:43:01.620 | or the union, then a new union with Belarus and Ukraine

02:43:05.060 | and Russia over time.

02:43:05.980 | But certainly, you know, remove Ukraine as a major factor,

02:43:10.740 | independent factor on the world stage,

02:43:12.580 | and, you know, consolidate Crimea and maybe, you know,

02:43:16.180 | kind of incorporate Donetsk and Luhansk, you know,

02:43:18.380 | kind of that was also a possibility.

02:43:20.540 | But it wasn't in his intention, in any case,

02:43:23.620 | to have something on this kind of scale.

02:43:25.380 | He wanted to get on with then preparing

02:43:27.100 | for what was going to be, he would think,

02:43:29.060 | the cakewalk, the shoe-in of the next presidential election.

02:43:32.700 | I mean, last time around,

02:43:33.620 | he had to invent a bit of competition

02:43:35.100 | with this person who's reputed to be his goddaughter,

02:43:38.020 | Ksenia Sobchak, you know, for a bit of, you know,

02:43:40.460 | kind of entertainment for people.

02:43:42.380 | This next time around, you know,

02:43:45.020 | maybe he wasn't really planning on running, you know,

02:43:47.260 | against any other, you know, serious opposition.

02:43:49.740 | He was just going to have the acclaim of, you know,

02:43:51.580 | the kind of the great leader, like President Xi in China.

02:43:56.180 | You know, Putin, you know, was basically,

02:43:58.220 | I think, you know, he also hoped that he would be able

02:44:00.500 | to devolve some authority away, you know,

02:44:02.260 | kind of so he's more like the, you know,

02:44:04.660 | the supreme leader kind of figure,

02:44:06.500 | the czar-like figure, the monarch.

02:44:08.420 | And then, you know, other people get on

02:44:09.860 | with the chief executive, prime ministerial,

02:44:12.820 | running the country, and he could kind of, like,

02:44:14.540 | step back and just enjoy this, you know,

02:44:16.340 | maybe there was going to be, again,

02:44:17.260 | a new union of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine,

02:44:22.260 | in some, you know, fashion, and he could preside over that.

02:44:25.820 | - So speaking of opposition,

02:44:27.300 | you've criticized the famed Putin critic, Alexei Navalny.

02:44:32.300 | What's the nature of your criticism?

02:44:34.500 | - Well, it hasn't really been a kind of a criticism

02:44:36.420 | in the way that, you know, people have implied,

02:44:38.540 | but more just reminding people that Navalny

02:44:40.900 | isn't some stooge of the West, as other people have,

02:44:43.340 | you know, kind of depicted him in the Russian film,

02:44:46.700 | but, you know, saying that this is kind of,

02:44:47.940 | you know, he's pro-Western.

02:44:49.660 | He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot.

02:44:53.100 | You know, in the past, he's articulated, you know,

02:44:56.980 | things are not so dissimilar

02:44:58.420 | from some of the people around Putin.

02:45:00.500 | And it's more just reminding people that, you know,

02:45:02.860 | just because you kind of see somebody, you know,

02:45:05.420 | as a kind of an opposition figure

02:45:07.140 | or somebody who might be more palatable from, you know,

02:45:09.500 | your perspective looking from the West,

02:45:11.700 | they're not always going to be, you know,

02:45:13.060 | what you think they are.

02:45:14.380 | Alexei Navalny is a Russian,

02:45:16.620 | and, you know, in a particular Russian context,

02:45:18.740 | he's different from Putin,

02:45:20.700 | but he wouldn't necessarily, you know,

02:45:22.940 | kind of run, you know, the Russian system

02:45:25.220 | in ways that we will like.

02:45:27.260 | So that's kind of, it's not a kind of a criticism.

02:45:29.700 | It's more of a critique of the way that we look at things.

02:45:32.420 | You know, I think it's a mistake to always, you know,

02:45:34.140 | say, "Oh, this is pro-Western," or, "This is a, you know,

02:45:36.300 | liberal." I mean, what the heck does that mean, pro-Western?

02:45:38.780 | I mean, he's a Russian.

02:45:40.060 | He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot.

02:45:42.020 | And he's often, you know, been, you know,

02:45:44.180 | quite critical about immigration.

02:45:47.140 | He's had some negative views about, you know,

02:45:49.180 | from one point of view, he said, "Don't feed the Caucasus,"

02:45:51.500 | you know, kind of played upon some of the, you know,

02:45:53.740 | the racial and ethnic tensions inside of,

02:45:56.780 | you know, Russia itself as well.

02:45:58.580 | Now, he is a pluralist, you know, and he's kind of,

02:46:00.980 | and he wants to have, you know,

02:46:02.740 | a different set of political actors there,

02:46:06.860 | but he also isn't promoting revolution.

02:46:08.660 | He's not Lenin.

02:46:09.500 | He's not wanting to bring down the state.

02:46:12.260 | He wants to kind of, you know,

02:46:13.460 | change the people who are in charge.

02:46:16.700 | That's what he's being basically focused on.

02:46:18.340 | And, you know, he might have,

02:46:20.420 | and have things and do things that, you know,

02:46:22.700 | we elsewhere might not like.

02:46:24.700 | - And I guess the bigger picture there is,

02:46:27.020 | it's not trivial to know that if you place another human

02:46:32.300 | in power to replace the current human in power,

02:46:36.220 | that things are going to be better.

02:46:37.340 | They could be a lot worse.

02:46:38.900 | Because there's a momentum to a system.

02:46:42.900 | A system is bigger than just this leader,

02:46:44.660 | even when that leader has a huge amount of power.

02:46:47.900 | - That's absolutely right.

02:46:49.180 | And, you know, he grew up in that, you know, same system.

02:46:51.500 | Now he's younger than Putin,

02:46:53.060 | so he's got a different generational perspective.

02:46:56.060 | And he's not wedded to the Soviet Union,

02:46:59.140 | or, you know, kind of some concept of the Russian empire.

02:47:01.380 | He doesn't seem to spend a lot of time,

02:47:02.620 | I don't know what he's doing, you know, in jail,

02:47:04.380 | but he's probably not sitting around, you know,

02:47:05.900 | reading Lomonosov and, you know,

02:47:07.380 | kind of the great kind of tracts of Russian history.

02:47:10.060 | Could be, actually.

02:47:11.220 | But I mean, I think, you know,

02:47:12.220 | Navalny has a different worldview

02:47:13.620 | and a different perspective,

02:47:14.620 | just like Medvedev was different, you know,

02:47:17.100 | in his time in presidency and made some, you know,

02:47:20.300 | changes and some innovations there.

02:47:22.380 | But don't think that they're going to be

02:47:23.660 | radically different.

02:47:24.500 | Because look, Gorbachev, I mean,

02:47:25.820 | he was so different from Andropov and Cherenko

02:47:29.740 | and others as a person,

02:47:31.500 | but he was also constrained by the system.

02:47:34.220 | And he wanted to have change,

02:47:35.500 | but he wanted evolutionary change.

02:47:36.820 | He didn't know how to do it,

02:47:37.660 | but he didn't want to bring the whole system down.

02:47:39.180 | Look at Khrushchev.

02:47:40.540 | When he came in, you know,

02:47:41.580 | after that whole period of, you know,

02:47:45.820 | everybody trying to figure out what to do

02:47:47.140 | after Stalin had died and there was all this

02:47:49.180 | kind of back and forth,

02:47:50.020 | and eventually Khrushchev emerges.

02:47:51.300 | And, you know, he tries to make changes to the system,

02:47:53.380 | but he's also a creature of a very specific context.

02:47:56.980 | He's grown up in the same system.

02:47:58.380 | And he, you know, kind of brings

02:47:59.860 | all kinds of elements of chaos there,

02:48:01.940 | you know, to the whole thing.

02:48:03.460 | And, you know, gets into a standoff with the United States,

02:48:06.660 | that we know is the Cuban Missile Crisis,

02:48:09.460 | and eventually, you know, gets removed.

02:48:11.380 | You know, we're looking at what's happening

02:48:12.780 | in the United Kingdom right now.

02:48:14.780 | You know, they've just churned through three prime ministers

02:48:19.380 | and actually five prime ministers in, you know,

02:48:21.620 | kind of as many years,

02:48:22.540 | but all of those prime ministers have come out

02:48:24.260 | of the context of the Conservative Party.

02:48:26.060 | They're all, you know, kind of just shades of,

02:48:28.540 | you know, the same thing.

02:48:29.620 | They've all come out of the same academic

02:48:31.580 | and, you know, kind of privileged backgrounds.

02:48:33.980 | Even Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister,

02:48:37.060 | who's the first, you know, Indian or Anglo-Indian

02:48:40.900 | prime minister in British history.

02:48:43.340 | It was a kind of phenomenal, you know,

02:48:44.740 | kind of as a child of Indian immigrants,

02:48:47.180 | but also a person of great privilege

02:48:50.020 | from the same academic and party background as the others.

02:48:53.580 | You know, so there are always differences

02:48:55.740 | with those human beings, but those contexts matter a lot.

02:48:58.500 | - What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine

02:49:01.780 | with a tactical nuclear weapon?

02:49:04.660 | - Well, Putin's definitely been thinking about it, right?

02:49:06.940 | I mean, he is the kind of person,

02:49:07.980 | if he's got an instrument,

02:49:08.820 | he wants to figure out how to use it.

02:49:10.460 | You know, we look at polonium, we look at Novichok,

02:49:12.820 | you know, we look at all kinds of things,

02:49:14.660 | you know, that he's also presided over in Syria.

02:49:17.860 | He has, you know, put in charge of the war in Ukraine now.

02:49:21.780 | General Savrykin is known as General Armageddon,

02:49:24.460 | you know, the kind of person who, you know,

02:49:26.140 | pretty much facilitated the use of chemical weapons

02:49:29.380 | in Syria, you know, for example.

02:49:31.540 | So, you know, don't think that Putin, you know,

02:49:34.020 | hasn't thought about how ruthless he can possibly be.

02:49:36.420 | The question is really the calculation.

02:49:38.820 | It's his estimation of the probability

02:49:41.300 | that it will get the desired effect.

02:49:43.100 | We keep talking about this idea of escalate to deescalate.

02:49:46.860 | That's not what the Russians, you know, how they call it,

02:49:48.860 | but it's the whole idea that you do something

02:49:50.700 | really outrageous to get everybody else to back off.

02:49:53.700 | Now, when you talked about the precedent

02:49:55.740 | that the United States set

02:49:58.340 | of detonating the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

02:50:03.340 | what, you know, he obviously meant the precedent

02:50:05.980 | of using nuclear weapons, of course,

02:50:07.380 | which, of course, we would then say,

02:50:09.100 | well, we showed them how the impermissibility

02:50:13.180 | of ever doing that again.

02:50:14.460 | But what he's talking about is the precedent

02:50:16.260 | of escalating to such an extent that you stop the war,

02:50:19.100 | because he reads that saying, well, you know,

02:50:21.820 | the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

02:50:24.500 | The war was brought to a quick conclusion.

02:50:26.540 | And of course, there's a huge debate in America

02:50:28.860 | about whether it was necessary to do that,

02:50:30.500 | whether the war was ending anyway.

02:50:32.100 | Did that really, you know, kind of change the minds

02:50:35.260 | of the Japanese high command?

02:50:36.900 | I mean, there's all kinds of books

02:50:38.220 | and being written about that.

02:50:40.660 | And of course, you know, the revulsion that people felt

02:50:43.140 | in the wake of that was just, you know,

02:50:44.900 | just the shock of what actually happened.

02:50:47.100 | And we've spent, you know, 70 years, you know,

02:50:49.300 | basically coming to terms with the fact

02:50:50.940 | that we did something like that.

02:50:52.580 | You know, the firebombing, you know,

02:50:53.740 | we've also looked at all the bombing, you know,

02:50:55.940 | in Vietnam and everywhere.

02:50:57.500 | And, you know, all these massive bombing campaigns

02:51:00.420 | and realizing they actually often had the opposite effect.

02:51:03.020 | Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have contributed

02:51:05.660 | and there's a lot of, you know, scholarship suggesting

02:51:07.300 | it did to the end of the war.

02:51:08.620 | But all of the big bombing campaigns,

02:51:10.220 | the destruction actually prolonged wars

02:51:12.060 | because they made people fight back,

02:51:13.460 | as we're kind of seeing in the case of Ukraine.

02:51:15.020 | So Putin has to calculate the probability

02:51:18.620 | that if he uses some tactical nuclear weapon,

02:51:21.940 | that it will get the desired effect,

02:51:23.340 | which is get us to capitulate and Ukraine to capitulate.

02:51:26.500 | Us to capitulate, meaning the United States and the Europeans

02:51:29.380 | not supporting Ukraine anymore,

02:51:30.820 | pushing towards a negotiating table

02:51:32.540 | and negotiating Ukraine away.

02:51:34.300 | And Ukraine saying, "Okay, we give up,"

02:51:36.420 | like happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or in Japan.

02:51:41.300 | So it's his calculation, you know,

02:51:43.980 | as much as anything else, which is really important.

02:51:45.740 | He said, "We have to show him

02:51:46.860 | that he won't get that out of it."

02:51:48.180 | It's kind of less our probability

02:51:49.780 | and, you know, kind of the odds of it.

02:51:50.940 | It's just how he calculates that probability

02:51:54.180 | of getting what he wants.

02:51:56.020 | - I mean, I guess that's how the game of poker works.

02:51:58.340 | It's your probability and your estimate of their probability

02:52:02.900 | and your estimate of their estimate of your probability

02:52:05.660 | and so on and so forth. - Yeah, so it goes on.

02:52:08.180 | - I think he has two tools, right?

02:52:10.060 | So one is the actual use of nuclear weapons

02:52:12.820 | and then the threat of the-

02:52:14.020 | - Oh, the threat is very effective.

02:52:15.780 | - And the more real you make the threat-

02:52:19.580 | - That's right.

02:52:20.420 | - So it's like the more you approach the actual use,

02:52:24.300 | like get very close to using it.

02:52:25.140 | - But actually he's already using Chernobyl,

02:52:28.140 | Zaporizhzhya and then usual cranes,

02:52:31.260 | the other nuclear reactors.

02:52:33.380 | So he's using civilian nuclear reactors as a dirty bomb.

02:52:36.300 | So, you know, it's ironic that he has Sergei Shoigu,

02:52:40.100 | his defense minister, calling people up and saying,

02:52:41.540 | "The Ukrainians are gonna use a dirty bomb."

02:52:42.900 | They're already doing it.

02:52:44.100 | I mean, what is, you know, kind of more destructive

02:52:47.540 | than stirring up all the radioactive dust in Chernobyl

02:52:49.940 | as you send your troops through, you know, for example,

02:52:52.460 | or shelling, you know, the Chernobyl plant

02:52:54.900 | and the sarcophagus and putting it at risk.

02:52:57.140 | And Zaporizhzhya, you've got the

02:52:58.740 | International Atomic Energy Agency

02:53:00.460 | running out there in utter panic

02:53:02.100 | and, you know, kind of also trying to intervene

02:53:05.020 | in the conflict.

02:53:06.180 | So you're putting, you know,

02:53:07.220 | civilian nuclear reactors at risk.

02:53:09.780 | I mean, that also has the great added effect

02:53:11.580 | of cutting off Ukraine's power supply

02:53:13.660 | because Zaporizhzhya in particular was,

02:53:16.100 | what was it, a third of Ukraine's power generation

02:53:19.780 | or some, you know, really high percentage.

02:53:21.380 | I'll have to go back and, you know, take a look at that.

02:53:23.380 | But that's a twofer, you know,

02:53:25.540 | it's a kind of a double effect there

02:53:27.620 | of undermining power generation,

02:53:30.980 | also frightening Germans and others

02:53:32.900 | who've already been very worried about nuclear power

02:53:35.020 | and, you know, increasing your leverage on the energy front,

02:53:37.460 | but also scaring people from the perspective

02:53:41.180 | of the use of nuclear weapon.

02:53:43.500 | Those reactors also become a nuclear weapon,

02:53:46.180 | tactically deployed.

02:53:47.420 | And as you said, the discussion of using a nuclear weapon

02:53:51.460 | and engendering all those fears,

02:53:53.620 | and he's already got an effect.

02:53:55.660 | Everyone's running around talking about

02:53:56.780 | the Cuban Missile Crisis and secret diplomacy

02:53:59.300 | and how we negotiate away Ukraine

02:54:01.140 | in return for Putin not blowing up a nuclear weapon.

02:54:03.860 | So he's got a lot of people already talking about that.

02:54:05.820 | - So sorry for the difficult and dark question.

02:54:09.740 | It could be for you directly or more like,

02:54:13.340 | do you think we have a plan for this?

02:54:15.220 | What happens if he does drop a nuclear weapon?

02:54:20.220 | Do you have a sense that the United States has a good plan?

02:54:25.220 | - I know we're talking about it.

02:54:29.380 | I think we probably have several plans

02:54:30.860 | because it depends on what, where, when, how.

02:54:34.140 | - But don't, and also don't these things happen very quickly?

02:54:39.860 | - Well, there's also signaling and signs of movement there.

02:54:44.900 | I mean, I want to be very kind of careful about this,

02:54:46.980 | but then the thing is,

02:54:47.820 | it's also very important that we do this

02:54:49.980 | with other nuclear powers.

02:54:51.540 | So the other thing that's different

02:54:53.660 | from how it might've been in the past,

02:54:55.580 | and particularly different from the Cuban Missile Crisis

02:54:57.700 | and the Euromissile Crisis,

02:54:58.620 | we're not the only nuclear players.

02:55:00.620 | China has a major nuclear arsenal now,

02:55:03.100 | less on the strategic side, but building it up,

02:55:06.540 | but very much on the intermediate range and tactical.

02:55:10.420 | Kim Jong-un is firing off weapons left, right, and center

02:55:13.260 | at the moment in North Korea.

02:55:14.380 | We've got other rogue states.

02:55:15.540 | Putin's behaving like a rogue state, just to be very clear.

02:55:18.140 | And this is what we've got with Kim Jong-un in North Korea.

02:55:20.820 | We've also got India and Pakistan,

02:55:23.740 | and we've got other states

02:55:25.140 | that we're not supposed to talk about

02:55:26.220 | that we know have nuclear capacities,

02:55:27.740 | and others that would like to have nuclear capacity.

02:55:30.660 | And the whole question here is about also proliferation.

02:55:34.780 | Getting back to that time when Ukraine had nuclear weapons,

02:55:38.500 | at least there on its territory

02:55:40.180 | instead of Belarus and Kazakhstan,

02:55:41.580 | you've got to wonder, was it wise for them to give it up?

02:55:44.180 | We were worried about loose nukes, nuclear weapons,

02:55:48.740 | getting out of hand.

02:55:50.140 | Proliferation at the time, we wanted fewer nuclear powers.

02:55:53.260 | Russia wanted that too.

02:55:54.820 | Now we're going to have more.

02:55:56.220 | We've got more.

02:55:57.220 | And what Putin is saying is,

02:55:58.740 | well, that was stupid of Ukraine

02:56:00.020 | to give up the nuclear weapons.

02:56:01.580 | In fact, my colleagues and I, back in our report

02:56:04.140 | and back in the U.S.S.R., kind of suggest

02:56:05.460 | they shouldn't give them up.

02:56:07.020 | And then that's why we had the Budapest memorandum.

02:56:09.460 | That's why the United States,

02:56:10.620 | the United Kingdom in particular,

02:56:12.700 | have basically some responsibility and obligation

02:56:16.460 | going back to 1994 when they promised Ukraine

02:56:19.300 | that gave up the nuclear weapons,

02:56:20.620 | their territorial integrity and sovereignty

02:56:22.620 | would remain intact,

02:56:23.820 | some obligation to actually do something to step up.

02:56:26.060 | If we step back from that,

02:56:27.540 | this is the thing that people are not talking about,

02:56:30.500 | you know, what about nuclear proliferation?

02:56:31.980 | If you're South Korea, Japan,

02:56:33.900 | you know, you're any other country

02:56:35.060 | that's kind of worrying about your neighbors,

02:56:37.380 | and you know, what might happen to you?

02:56:39.380 | Just like India and Pakistan are both like,

02:56:41.340 | "Oh, you know, we've got to kind of keep

02:56:42.900 | our strategic nuclear balance here."

02:56:45.020 | Everything is up for question.

02:56:46.620 | Saudis will want a nuclear weapon.

02:56:48.220 | The Turks already want one.

02:56:49.260 | They've talked about one for years.

02:56:50.860 | You know, why should the Iranians be the only one

02:56:52.500 | with an Islamic nuclear weapon?

02:56:54.780 | You know, and if we know that, you know,

02:56:56.980 | Iran has breakout capacity now,

02:57:00.620 | the Saudis and all the other, you know, states

02:57:03.380 | that are in opposition to Iran

02:57:04.860 | will also want to have some nuclear capacity.

02:57:06.820 | And the United States before wanted to maintain

02:57:08.660 | everything under the nuclear umbrella.

02:57:10.100 | You know, one of the reasons why Sweden and Finland

02:57:11.820 | are joining NATO is because of, suddenly,

02:57:13.620 | all of these nuclear threats.

02:57:15.500 | Sweden was actually the last country on the planet

02:57:17.620 | to want to have nuclear weapons.

02:57:18.660 | They were actually pushing for a ban

02:57:20.220 | on nuclear weapons in the United Nations.

02:57:21.740 | Now that Putin's doing the nuclear saber-rattling,

02:57:25.340 | you know, they're talking about joining

02:57:27.300 | and are on the verge of joining a nuclear alliance.

02:57:31.300 | You know, see what's happening here.

02:57:33.060 | So we have to make it more and more difficult

02:57:36.140 | for Putin to even contemplate that.

02:57:37.540 | That's why people are saying this is reckless,

02:57:39.460 | this is irresponsible.

02:57:40.860 | Putin is actually making the world less safe

02:57:42.900 | for himself down the line either,

02:57:44.500 | but he's thinking short-term here.

02:57:46.460 | He's thinking, "What can I do?

02:57:47.780 | What do I actually have?"

02:57:49.380 | You can also destroy lots of infrastructure,

02:57:51.100 | as he's doing.

02:57:52.420 | You can use subversion.

02:57:53.500 | You know, we're worried about all of the undersea cables,

02:57:55.580 | all these weird things happening, you know,

02:57:57.180 | off Orkney or in the Mediterranean,

02:57:59.220 | or, you know, all these other things that are happening,

02:58:01.740 | Nord Stream 2, pipelines, other infrastructure.

02:58:04.540 | There's all kinds of other things

02:58:05.540 | that he can do as well here.

02:58:07.060 | It's not just, you know,

02:58:09.020 | again, this is a civilian nuclear threat

02:58:11.620 | of blowing up, you know, one of the reactors.

02:58:14.220 | Now, he's got to be sure about where the wind turns

02:58:16.540 | and the wind blows.

02:58:18.300 | And there's all kinds of things to, you know, factor in here.

02:58:21.340 | But Putin is definitely sitting around

02:58:23.940 | calculating with other people,

02:58:25.300 | "What can I do to turn this around?"

02:58:28.180 | I mean, he still thinks that he can win this.

02:58:31.340 | Or, in other words, he can end it on his terms.

02:58:35.660 | Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia.

02:58:41.140 | And, you know, capitulation,

02:58:43.020 | all recognized as being part of Russia.

02:58:47.420 | Or he can freeze it and then, you know,

02:58:49.340 | kind of figure out where it goes from there,

02:58:51.500 | what other pressure he can put on.

02:58:52.980 | I mean, I'm sure he's confident he can get rid of Zelensky.

02:58:56.060 | And he can prevail over us.

02:58:57.620 | I mean, look, I mean, the UK is going through prime ministers,

02:59:00.140 | you know, faster than I'm changing my socks, you know.

02:59:02.780 | So it's like, you know, he can prevail on the, you know,

02:59:07.420 | basically he can have an impact

02:59:10.580 | on the political scene in Europe and elsewhere.

02:59:13.660 | I mean, again, everyone's talking about winter coming.

02:59:16.020 | And Putin's thinking, "Yeah, great.

02:59:18.220 | I've, you know, destroyed the infrastructure of Ukraine."

02:59:21.620 | - Are you worried about the winter?

02:59:23.620 | - Well, yeah, but I mean, look,

02:59:24.700 | the other thing is that we have to start preparing.

02:59:27.020 | I mean, we have to start thinking about this.

02:59:28.940 | We've got a wartime economy situation.

02:59:32.100 | That's where we are.

02:59:33.100 | We've got the home front to think about as well.

02:59:34.940 | Putin has declared war on us.

02:59:36.980 | He did that on September 30th.

02:59:38.500 | And he's done it at other points as well.

02:59:40.260 | We've just not paid attention.

02:59:42.580 | But he pretty much, pretty explicit on September 30th.

02:59:44.820 | I mean, go back and watch that speech.

02:59:47.820 | And, you know, he is gambling that, you know,

02:59:50.940 | people will go back, you know,

02:59:52.780 | to basically taking Russian gas and oil,

02:59:55.340 | but it's not gonna be that simple as well.

02:59:58.020 | And do people, and then, you know,

02:59:59.980 | the question has to be,

03:00:00.820 | do we really kind of think he's gonna play fair after that?

03:00:03.540 | When he's kind of also shown that he can leverage that.

03:00:06.540 | - It's such a complicated world.

03:00:09.140 | - It is complicated.

03:00:10.140 | It's very complicated.

03:00:10.980 | - And it's never, I mean,

03:00:11.980 | it feels like things are heating up.

03:00:15.100 | Like, and China is very quiet right now.

03:00:20.100 | - Because they're watching what happens.

03:00:22.700 | I mean, for President Xi,

03:00:24.220 | you know, he's trying to consolidate his power

03:00:28.140 | even further after the party Congress,

03:00:29.860 | but he doesn't want to look like he made a mistake

03:00:32.260 | by backing Putin.

03:00:34.180 | I mean, he thought Putin was also gonna be in out,

03:00:36.740 | and Ukraine would probably be open

03:00:39.740 | for massive Chinese investment.

03:00:41.420 | China was the largest investor in Ukraine before the war.

03:00:46.420 | Largest single investor.

03:00:47.540 | I mean, the EU was bigger, of course.

03:00:49.220 | - How do you hope the war ends in Ukraine?

03:00:51.740 | - Well, I mean, I do hope it ends, you know,

03:00:56.740 | with a ceasefire and a negotiated solution,

03:00:59.100 | but it has to be with Russia compromising on something.

03:01:02.060 | And that's not where we are right now.

03:01:03.540 | - Do you think both sides might be willing to compromise?

03:01:08.020 | - Most wars always end in that way.

03:01:10.380 | I mean, nobody's ever happy.

03:01:11.740 | - But they don't seem to, either side,

03:01:14.180 | like legitimately doesn't want to compromise right now.

03:01:17.820 | - Yeah, because I mean, look,

03:01:18.780 | the thing is that for Ukraine right now,

03:01:22.460 | anything is a compromise at its expense, right?

03:01:26.020 | Vast devastation, unbelievable casualty rates,

03:01:29.780 | biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

03:01:33.620 | Russia's just said, "Sorry, this is our territory.

03:01:35.700 | It's not just Crimea."

03:01:36.660 | I think there could have been a negotiation over that.

03:01:39.380 | But, you know, Donetsk and Luhansk,

03:01:40.940 | I mean, we've got all kinds of formulas we've had

03:01:42.860 | all the way through history of, you know,

03:01:45.580 | putting things under a kind of guardianship,

03:01:47.460 | receivership of territory, the United Nations,

03:01:49.580 | all kinds of different ways of formulating that.

03:01:51.740 | We could have easily been creative.

03:01:53.380 | But Russia's basically saying, "Nope, sorry,

03:01:54.620 | we've taken this and any other negotiations,

03:01:57.420 | just you recognizing this for us not doing more destruction."

03:02:01.260 | I mean, that is not the basis for a negotiation.

03:02:04.540 | And, you know, having, you know, kind of people come

03:02:06.260 | and just sort of laying those terms down

03:02:07.700 | is not a starting position.

03:02:09.380 | I think Russia is also, you know,

03:02:13.900 | in a dilemma of its own making now

03:02:16.380 | because Putin has made it very difficult, you know,

03:02:18.420 | to compromise just by everything that he said.

03:02:21.460 | Now, for Ukraine, they've already won

03:02:24.260 | a great moral, political, and military victory.

03:02:27.780 | It's just hard to see it, right, at the particular moment.

03:02:31.140 | They've done what the Finns did in the Winter War,

03:02:33.980 | which the Finns were devastated by the Winter War as well,

03:02:35.980 | but they pushed them back.

03:02:37.740 | Now, the Finns lost a lot of territory.

03:02:39.180 | They lost Karelia and, you know, huge swathes of territory,

03:02:42.020 | but they got to be Finland.

03:02:44.980 | And now they're, you know, joining NATO,

03:02:47.300 | but they've been part of the EU.

03:02:49.100 | The question is how to, you know,

03:02:51.820 | get Ukraine to be Ukraine in a success.

03:02:55.980 | But, you know, is, and that's the challenge.

03:02:58.300 | Now, again, they've already won psychologically,

03:03:01.140 | politically, militarily, because Putin hasn't succeeded

03:03:05.260 | in what he wanted to do, but he has succeeded

03:03:07.140 | in completely and utterly devastating them.

03:03:09.340 | And this is the kind of the old Muscovite,

03:03:12.220 | the old Russian imperial, old Soviet mentality,

03:03:14.700 | you know, going all the way back to when the Muscovites

03:03:17.860 | were the bag men for the, you know, the horde,

03:03:20.380 | for the Mongols, it was destruction.

03:03:22.660 | You know, you don't play with us, we'll destroy you.

03:03:25.900 | You know, people talk about it as mafia,

03:03:27.260 | but it's all, you know, all you have to go down

03:03:29.420 | is to go and see Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublyov."

03:03:32.540 | I mean, I remember, you know, seeing that film

03:03:34.140 | when I was first as a student in Moscow

03:03:35.780 | and just being, whoa, this is so brutal.

03:03:38.460 | I mean, this is just unremittingly brutal,

03:03:42.540 | because the whole point is that you show people

03:03:46.660 | who's the boss.

03:03:48.140 | The destruction is the point of things as well,

03:03:50.860 | because, you know, you are emphasizing your domination.

03:03:55.860 | And that's what Putin is doing right now,

03:03:59.020 | is saying, okay, you want to go in a different direction,

03:04:02.620 | so be it, but I'm going to make you suffer.

03:04:05.180 | Remember when Khodorkovsky got out of the penal colony,

03:04:09.660 | when Putin let him out eventually?

03:04:11.500 | He said he's suffered enough.

03:04:14.260 | But he suffered for 10, 11 years.

03:04:16.380 | I don't think Putin feels that Ukraine

03:04:19.820 | has suffered enough at this point,

03:04:21.300 | or we have suffered enough.

03:04:22.140 | - So there's a part of this invasion

03:04:24.860 | that's punishment for something.

03:04:27.140 | - Yeah, it's medieval.

03:04:29.180 | I mean, look, we're all capable of the same things, right?

03:04:31.500 | There was all that destruction,

03:04:32.580 | and that's what Assad was like in Syria,

03:04:35.140 | like his father, who you destroy

03:04:37.660 | because you teach him a lesson.

03:04:39.580 | And look, Britain did that in the colonial era.

03:04:41.700 | I mean, all the history of British colonialism

03:04:43.820 | is exactly the same.

03:04:45.460 | I mean, all the Mao Mao, you know, and Kenya,

03:04:47.500 | you know, up until recent times, brutality.

03:04:50.740 | Teaching people, you know, teaching them a lesson.

03:04:53.460 | You have to suffer.

03:04:54.740 | The US did it.

03:04:55.580 | I mean, we did it with the Native Americans.

03:04:57.020 | You know, we did it all over the place, you know, as well.

03:04:59.340 | This is kind of what big states do

03:05:02.020 | at different points in history.

03:05:04.420 | It's just that, you know, Russia has not moved on from that.

03:05:07.420 | And we've learned some lessons later.

03:05:08.780 | I hope we fully internalize them,

03:05:10.700 | of things that we've done, you know,

03:05:12.580 | kind of the past United States,

03:05:13.860 | we ideally are trying to do better,

03:05:16.100 | and most of Europe's trying to do better as well.

03:05:17.940 | Think about France and Algeria, you know, again.

03:05:20.500 | You know, we can see this in many different settings.

03:05:23.580 | But I think, you know, for Putin right now,

03:05:25.620 | he hasn't taught all of us sufficient a lesson.

03:05:28.180 | - I just, I talked to hundreds of people in Ukraine,

03:05:32.420 | and the tough thing,

03:05:35.620 | the inspiring thing is that there's a unity.

03:05:38.660 | The tough thing is a lot of them speak intensely of hate

03:05:43.660 | towards not just Russia, but Russians.

03:05:47.020 | Russians.

03:05:47.860 | - That's how Europeans felt about Germany and Germans

03:05:50.300 | at the end of World War II.

03:05:51.660 | - And generational hate.

03:05:55.420 | Like, I don't think that hate is gonna pass.

03:05:59.220 | - Well, it might well take a generation.

03:06:01.140 | I mean, when I was a kid in the '70s,

03:06:04.300 | I went on exchanges to Germany.

03:06:06.980 | And that was like, you know, 30 years,

03:06:09.380 | more than 30 years after the end of the war.

03:06:10.980 | My grandfather, who'd fought in World War I,

03:06:14.100 | wouldn't speak to my parents when they sent me on a,

03:06:17.220 | I mean, he hadn't fought in World War II,

03:06:18.060 | he fought in World War I, and he hated the Germans.

03:06:20.540 | And he did not want me going, you know,

03:06:23.340 | to Germany as an exchange student.

03:06:24.700 | He refused to meet, you know, kind of the German kid

03:06:27.420 | who, you know, came to stay at my house, you know,

03:06:30.340 | for example.

03:06:31.180 | I mean, it takes a long time to,

03:06:33.100 | you know, it takes a long time to get over that.

03:06:35.100 | But you do, and we have, we have in Europe.

03:06:38.220 | And that was the whole point of, you know,

03:06:40.740 | all of that kind of exercise of European unity

03:06:44.300 | after World War II.

03:06:45.500 | Now, the big challenge is, what do we do with Russia?

03:06:48.500 | Because a lot of people are talking now,

03:06:49.460 | we can't have European security without Russia.

03:06:51.140 | Other people are saying, we can't have a Europe,

03:06:53.580 | you know, kind of with Russia.

03:06:56.020 | You know, so how do we deal with this?

03:06:57.900 | We've got to basically kind of,

03:06:59.980 | it's gonna be like Japan and Germany

03:07:02.420 | after World War II, after this.

03:07:04.060 | Just the level of the atrocities

03:07:06.340 | that have been carried out,

03:07:07.340 | as you said, the level of hatred.

03:07:08.980 | But we found a way of doing it.

03:07:12.180 | Now, a lot of it will require change

03:07:16.020 | on the part of Russia as well, and Russians,

03:07:18.220 | and really thinking about this.

03:07:19.140 | I mean, Gorbachev before tried to deal

03:07:21.660 | in the late 1980s with the black spots in,

03:07:25.820 | with glasnost, with openness

03:07:27.940 | and talking about Russian history,

03:07:29.740 | just kind of never, sort of withered on the vine

03:07:32.420 | as time went on.

03:07:34.420 | - What gives you hope about the future?

03:07:37.740 | - Well, my hope comes into the fact

03:07:39.060 | that we've done things before,

03:07:40.340 | that we've got ourselves out of tough times

03:07:41.900 | and we've overcome stuff and in people,

03:07:44.580 | because I meet amazing people.

03:07:46.260 | You just talked about hundreds of people

03:07:47.820 | that you've met within Ukraine.

03:07:49.380 | And, you know, people all think differently,

03:07:52.500 | contexts and circumstances change

03:07:54.580 | and people can evolve.

03:07:55.740 | Some people get stuck, Putin's got stuck,

03:07:58.340 | but people can evolve.

03:08:00.460 | And, you know, I do think that

03:08:02.460 | if we all pull together

03:08:04.180 | and we've seen this in so many contexts,

03:08:06.020 | we can find solutions to things,

03:08:07.700 | just like we get back again

03:08:08.780 | to our discussion about scientists

03:08:10.620 | and just the kind of amazing breakthroughs of,

03:08:13.660 | you know, what we did on COVID

03:08:15.500 | or done on, you know, kind of other diseases and things.

03:08:18.660 | And look, there is some similarities.

03:08:21.460 | There's a pathology around war and conflict.

03:08:24.380 | Years ago in the 1990s, I worked on,

03:08:27.100 | you know, a lot of the projects

03:08:29.140 | that were funded by the Carnegie Corporation

03:08:31.340 | of the United States under the then presidency

03:08:34.260 | of David Hamburg, who was a scientist.

03:08:36.380 | And I actually did see a lot of parallels

03:08:38.220 | between the sort of like the pathology of disease

03:08:40.260 | and, you know, kind of the pestilence,

03:08:43.860 | you know, of conflict kind of idea.

03:08:46.140 | And of course, these, you know, parallels

03:08:47.460 | had to be very careful because, you know, they're not neat.

03:08:50.020 | But there was kind of like an idea in there

03:08:51.620 | and how do you sort of treat this?

03:08:52.900 | How do you deal with this?

03:08:54.820 | And we did come up with all kinds of ideas

03:08:57.540 | and, you know, things that are still out there.

03:08:59.980 | We've created institutions that have helped to keep the peace.

03:09:02.420 | We just have neglected them,

03:09:04.860 | allowed them to degrade, just like the United Nations.

03:09:07.940 | And, you know, we've created problems inside of them,

03:09:11.860 | like the veto power of the permanent powers

03:09:14.420 | on the UN Security Council.

03:09:17.420 | But we can change that.

03:09:19.060 | You just got to have a will.

03:09:20.140 | And I do think out there,

03:09:21.460 | there are sufficient people with a will

03:09:23.300 | and we've just got to get people mobilized.

03:09:25.100 | I mean, I'm always amazed by how people

03:09:26.540 | can mobilize themselves around a crisis.

03:09:29.060 | Remember Winston Churchill, I don't quote all the time

03:09:31.340 | 'cause I can never remember half his quotes,

03:09:33.060 | but I do remember the one about

03:09:34.340 | never let a good crisis go to waste.

03:09:36.820 | And I always think that that, you know, yeah,

03:09:39.820 | we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste.

03:09:43.100 | And something else can come out of this,

03:09:44.580 | just like in Ukraine, we worried before

03:09:46.340 | about corruption in Ukraine, the influence of the oligarchs.

03:09:50.140 | We've got our own oligarchs here in the US

03:09:51.700 | we need to, you know, deal with as well.

03:09:53.540 | But this is a chance to do it differently.

03:09:56.380 | Yeah, it really is a chance to do things differently.

03:09:58.420 | - And a part of that is young people.

03:10:00.820 | I have to ask you.

03:10:02.060 | - And it's young people.

03:10:02.900 | I mean, I'm feeling a bit on the older side now,

03:10:04.460 | but I still feel I've got, you know,

03:10:05.660 | a bit of, you know, kind of youth within me at 57.

03:10:08.460 | I'm not that old, but I'm not that young,

03:10:10.180 | but we have to work together with younger and older people.

03:10:12.700 | You've got to work together in coalitions of,

03:10:14.700 | you know, across generations.

03:10:16.580 | - You remind me of kids who just graduated college

03:10:20.300 | and say, and I feel old.

03:10:23.660 | And say, yeah, no.

03:10:24.820 | - I don't actually feel old, but it is a number age.

03:10:27.260 | And you know, when you kind of think about, when I was--

03:10:29.540 | - I thought you don't like math.

03:10:30.780 | - Yeah, yeah, I don't like things like that.

03:10:32.620 | Yeah, but I find it interesting.

03:10:34.260 | But you know, when I was, I remember when I was a little kid

03:10:35.700 | I kept thinking about the year 2000

03:10:37.380 | and I thought, oh my God, I'll be dead.

03:10:38.900 | I'll be 35.

03:10:39.980 | (laughing)

03:10:41.780 | 22 years ago.

03:10:42.740 | - You've overcome a lot of struggle in your life

03:10:46.780 | based on different reasons, as you write about.

03:10:50.220 | Class being one of them.

03:10:54.580 | Your funny sounding accent being another,

03:10:57.380 | or just representation of class.

03:10:59.380 | But in general, through all of that,

03:11:03.500 | to be at the White House,

03:11:06.280 | to be one of the most powerful voices in the world,

03:11:11.180 | what advice would you give from grounded in your life story

03:11:14.780 | to somebody who's young, somebody who's in high school

03:11:17.260 | and college thinking of how they can have

03:11:19.620 | a big positive impact on the world?

03:11:22.180 | - Well, we all have a voice, right?

03:11:24.340 | We all have agency.

03:11:25.860 | We all actually have the ability to do something.

03:11:28.340 | And you can start small in your local community

03:11:31.060 | or even in your own classroom,

03:11:32.460 | just helping somebody else out

03:11:34.220 | or speaking up and advocating on behalf of things.

03:11:37.060 | When I was about 11 years old,

03:11:40.180 | I got involved with other kids on Save the Whales.

03:11:43.060 | We had all this kind of, we were hardly Greta Thunberg,

03:11:46.060 | but we kind of got together in a kind of network

03:11:48.220 | writing to people and trying to raise money

03:11:50.660 | to help save the whales.

03:11:52.380 | Now, actually the whales of the world

03:11:54.260 | are doing somewhat better.

03:11:55.740 | I can't say that that was because of me and my network,

03:11:58.380 | but it was kind of a way of organizing

03:12:01.020 | and kind of joining in a larger movement.

03:12:04.020 | Everybody can be part of something bigger.

03:12:06.660 | The thing is, it's all about working together with others

03:12:09.340 | and giving other people a chance as well.

03:12:11.420 | I think one thing is that our voices

03:12:14.260 | have more impact when they're amplified.

03:12:17.300 | They don't have to be the voices of discord

03:12:19.260 | or the voices of hate.

03:12:21.860 | You've been trying to do this with your podcast,

03:12:24.620 | kind of give people a voice, give them a kind of platform

03:12:28.020 | and get them to join in with other people.

03:12:30.940 | And one of the things that I've been trying to do

03:12:32.900 | is kind of go and talk to just as many people

03:12:35.700 | as I possibly can and say,

03:12:36.940 | "Look, we can all do something here.

03:12:39.420 | "We can all lend our voices to a cause

03:12:41.900 | "that we care deeply about.

03:12:43.100 | "We can be kind to each other.

03:12:44.700 | "We can give other people a chance.

03:12:46.180 | "We can kind of speak out

03:12:47.340 | "while we see that something is wrong.

03:12:48.980 | "And we can try to explain things to people."

03:12:52.020 | And what I'm trying to do at the moment

03:12:53.900 | is just sort of explain what I've learned about things

03:12:56.500 | and hope that that helps people

03:12:58.980 | make informed judgments of their own

03:13:00.780 | and that kind of maybe take things further

03:13:02.740 | and learn something more.

03:13:03.900 | It's like kind of like building up on the knowledge

03:13:06.780 | that I have to try to impart to others

03:13:09.980 | and everybody can do that different ways.

03:13:11.900 | You can kind of reach back.

03:13:13.460 | Yeah, if you're 14, help somebody who's seven.

03:13:15.420 | If you're 21, help somebody who's 14.

03:13:17.940 | Kind of in the kind of my age now,

03:13:20.580 | I'm always trying to reach back

03:13:22.660 | and work with younger people, listen to younger people,

03:13:26.380 | help them out, make connections for them,

03:13:29.500 | listen to what they have to say about something,

03:13:31.140 | try to incorporate that in things that I'm saying as well.

03:13:34.100 | The main point is that we've all got a voice,

03:13:35.740 | we've all got agency,

03:13:37.500 | and it always works better

03:13:38.700 | when we work together with other people.

03:13:40.500 | - But sometimes it can feel pretty hopeless.

03:13:43.100 | It can feel, I mean, there's low points.

03:13:45.860 | You seem to have a kind of a restless energy,

03:13:50.860 | a drive to you.

03:13:52.540 | Were there low points in the beginning

03:13:54.900 | when in your early days,

03:13:59.380 | when you're trying to get the education

03:14:01.220 | where it may have not been clear to you

03:14:04.100 | that you could be at all successful?

03:14:06.300 | - Yeah, there always were.

03:14:07.980 | I mean, there were lots of points where I was just despondent

03:14:10.860 | but then I'd meet somebody

03:14:13.660 | who would just suddenly turn things around.

03:14:15.460 | I was this look or was I out there looking for it?

03:14:18.060 | Sometimes if you're open and receptive

03:14:21.420 | to hearing something from someone else.

03:14:24.700 | I mean, there were often times where I felt so despondent,

03:14:27.740 | in such a black mood, I didn't think I'd be able to go on.

03:14:29.860 | And then I'd have a chance conversation with somebody.

03:14:32.820 | I mean, I once remember, I was sitting on a bench,

03:14:34.620 | I was probably 11 or 12, just crying my eyes out,

03:14:36.620 | just really upset.

03:14:37.460 | And an old lady just came and sat next to me,

03:14:39.700 | put her arm around me, said, "Oh, it's all right, pet.

03:14:42.020 | "What's the matter?

03:14:43.140 | "It can't be that bad, can it?"

03:14:44.580 | And it was just this human embrace.

03:14:47.260 | It's like somebody just basically reaching out to me

03:14:50.980 | that snapped me out of it.

03:14:52.860 | And I thought, "Here's somebody just,"

03:14:54.460 | she didn't know who I was,

03:14:55.300 | she just felt really bad that I was sitting, crying.

03:14:58.900 | And I mean, I can't even remember what it was about anymore.

03:15:01.740 | Now it just seems inconsequential.

03:15:03.380 | At the time, I probably thought my life was at an end.

03:15:05.660 | Just sometimes people making eye contact

03:15:07.820 | with you in the street and saying something to you

03:15:10.140 | can kind of pull you out of something.

03:15:12.660 | And it's kind of a,

03:15:14.820 | I think you would just have to open yourself up

03:15:16.940 | to the prospect that not everyone's bad,

03:15:18.580 | just like you were saying before,

03:15:19.660 | that there's good in everybody.

03:15:21.940 | Even during that really difficult period of impeachment,

03:15:25.820 | I was trying to listen very carefully to people.

03:15:28.300 | And I thought, "Look, we still have something in common here.

03:15:31.980 | "We need to remember that."

03:15:33.420 | When people are kind of forgetting who they are

03:15:36.380 | or the context in their operating,

03:15:39.540 | there's always something that can pull you back again.

03:15:42.660 | There's always that kind of thread.

03:15:44.300 | - So I'm sure you were probably attacked by a lot of people

03:15:49.300 | and you were still able to keep that optimism that-

03:15:53.900 | - Well, I kept it into kind of perspective.

03:15:55.460 | Like when I was a kid, I mean,

03:15:56.740 | things I mentioned before, I got bullied,

03:15:58.660 | kind of, again, and I tried to understand

03:16:00.460 | why they're doing this.

03:16:01.620 | One of the most amazing things that happened really on

03:16:06.260 | was my dad was a pretty incredible person

03:16:08.500 | and he would always open my eyes to something.

03:16:10.460 | I was getting bullied really nastily by a girl at school.

03:16:13.820 | And my dad started asking me questions about her.

03:16:16.620 | And one day, my dad said we were gonna go for a walk.

03:16:19.980 | And my town's very small.

03:16:22.180 | Remember, it's very depressed, really deprived area.

03:16:24.860 | And we go to this housing estate, public housing place

03:16:28.220 | that's not too far away from where I live.

03:16:29.780 | And it's really kind of one of the most run-down places

03:16:32.500 | and already run-down place.

03:16:34.380 | My dad knocks on the door and I said, "What are we doing, dad?"

03:16:36.980 | And I see he says, "We're going off to,

03:16:39.060 | we're gonna visit somebody, an old family friend."

03:16:42.060 | I think even a distant relative.

03:16:44.260 | We're knocking on the door and this old man answers the door

03:16:45.940 | and he's, "Oh, Alfie."

03:16:47.300 | My dad's name was Alf Alfie.

03:16:48.820 | You know, kind of, "Oh, fancy seeing you here.

03:16:50.820 | I haven't seen you.

03:16:51.660 | Come on in, have a cup of tea.

03:16:52.580 | What are you doing?"

03:16:53.420 | He said, "Oh, I'm just walking past with my daughter.

03:16:54.620 | We're going for a trip."

03:16:55.820 | There, we're going for a walk.

03:16:57.420 | And then suddenly I see that girl and she's in the kitchen.

03:17:00.900 | And I'm thinking, "Oh my God, bloody hell."

03:17:03.740 | You know, British expression, "What's this?"

03:17:05.860 | And it turns out that dad had figured out who she was.

03:17:09.300 | And he knew her grandfather

03:17:10.980 | and she was living with her grandfather.

03:17:12.340 | And she'd been abandoned by her parents.

03:17:14.220 | And she was living in, you know, pretty dire circumstances.

03:17:16.900 | And she'd been getting raised by her grandfather

03:17:18.740 | and she was just miserable.

03:17:20.500 | And the reason she was bullying me

03:17:21.780 | was to make herself feel better.

03:17:24.060 | And after that, she never bullied me again.

03:17:25.660 | I mean, we didn't even talk.

03:17:27.060 | Because there was a connection made.

03:17:29.460 | And suddenly she realized that her grandfather,

03:17:31.660 | who was the only person she had,

03:17:33.620 | knew my dad and they were friends or they were even family.

03:17:37.340 | Some kind of relationship there.

03:17:39.620 | I mean, I was raised half north of England.

03:17:41.660 | I had no idea how we were related.

03:17:43.060 | You know, everybody was some relative.

03:17:44.500 | Because people have lived there for generations

03:17:45.860 | to get in this very small area.

03:17:47.660 | And that turned things around.

03:17:48.940 | So just remember, you might have.

03:17:50.900 | And that's kind of suddenly taught to me

03:17:52.220 | there's always a reason why somebody is doing something.

03:17:54.580 | A lot of the times they're really unhappy with themselves.

03:17:56.700 | Sometimes there's something else going on in their lives.

03:17:58.740 | Sometimes they just don't know any better.

03:18:00.860 | And I shouldn't take it personally

03:18:03.060 | because I don't have a personal connection

03:18:04.380 | with half these people who are out there

03:18:05.780 | saying that they want this and that to happen to me.

03:18:08.500 | - Well, thank you for the kindness and the empathy

03:18:10.740 | you still carry in your heart.

03:18:11.980 | I can see it through all that you must have gone through

03:18:14.100 | in the recent couple of years.

03:18:16.540 | It's really inspiring to see that.

03:18:18.020 | And thank you for everything you've done,

03:18:20.620 | for the work you've written,

03:18:21.820 | for the work you continue to write and to do.

03:18:24.100 | This seems like a really, really difficult time

03:18:27.740 | for human civilization on a topic

03:18:29.820 | that you're a world expert in.

03:18:31.860 | So don't mess it up.

03:18:33.980 | - No, I know, but that's what I was saying.

03:18:34.820 | Do everybody have that?

03:18:35.660 | Let's just keep it together, right?

03:18:37.380 | - Yeah, exactly.

03:18:39.340 | - Let's just keep it together.

03:18:40.220 | - Your words have a lot of power right now.

03:18:42.380 | So it's a really, really tricky time.

03:18:45.380 | So thank you so much.

03:18:46.780 | Given how valuable your time is to sit down with me today.

03:18:49.420 | It was an honor.

03:18:50.260 | - No, thanks, thanks.

03:18:51.100 | No, it's a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you as well.

03:18:53.180 | No, thank you.

03:18:54.740 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Fiona Hill.

03:18:57.260 | To support this podcast,

03:18:58.500 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:19:01.420 | And now let me leave you some words from John Steinbeck.

03:19:05.020 | Power does not corrupt, fear corrupts.

03:19:08.660 | Perhaps the fear of the loss of power.

03:19:11.780 | Thank you for listening.

03:19:14.100 | I hope to see you next time.

03:19:15.980 | (upbeat music)

03:19:18.580 | (upbeat music)

03:19:21.180 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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