Trump, Putin, and the End of American Power — with Dr. Fiona Hill

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episode 366, Route 366 ran off Route 66 in New Mexico.

In 1966, Star Trek premiered on TV and Medicare became available for the first time.

True to it.

I often get Star Wars and Star Trek confused.

It's a Wookiee mistake.

Go, go, go!

Welcome to the 366th episode of the Prop G-Pod.

Yeah, going to add jokes, feeling a little bit down, but I'm happy I'm vulgar and crude.

When I'm not, I get sort of, I don't know, less happy.

and uh or less crude and less vulgar.

Why am I not happy?

I don't know about you.

I've been a little freaked out about, I don't don't know, society recently.

It feels as if we're having this false debate over who's responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk.

And it upsets me

that we don't appear to want to be focused on the real problems.

And that is we're now down to interpreting fonts on shell casings to try and blame the other side.

And the issue is, okay, what if you manage to convince the public that it is the other side's fault?

Isn't that just going to result in more violence?

Like, where does that get us?

And our leaders are supposed to prevent a tragedy of commons and be real leaders and get to the bottom of an issue and address the actual issue.

And I see it

the culprits here is really hiding in plain sight.

One, we have 40% of the S ⁇ P.

My market cap is essentially trafficking and rage.

And they figured out that it isn't sex that sells, it's rage.

And if you can elevate really incendiary, ugly content after determining someone's political persuasion and starting to serve them content that makes the other side look bad and enrages you, that you keep them glued to their phone for longer and longer and longer.

And we've essentially built the largest rage machine in history that unfortunately creates the greatest level of shareholder value in history.

So we have attached economic value and prosperity to rage.

We have young men who are just more prone to this type of violence.

98% of mass shooters, and as far as I can tell, I did some research, all perpetrators of political violence are wait-for-it men.

They're usually young men.

And

we have, unfortunately, a society that is just producing too many men with a lack of emotional or connection to others, connection to work, school,

connection to their parents.

And what do all these men have in common?

They're extremely online.

Extremely online.

The majority of them are less politically engaged than your average citizen.

Most of them don't even vote.

But we see this engagement in violence entrepreneurship where politicians see an opportunity to demonize the other side or advance their own agendas by exploiting violence.

So what do we have?

We have a rage machine.

We have men who have a lack.

of economic and romantic opportunities.

And then finally, and it's an exhausting debate, but in the next six hours, more people are going to die from gun deaths in the United States than die in the entire year

in the United Kingdom.

So we don't have a monopoly on the rage machine, which has gone global.

We don't have a monopoly on young men with a lack of opportunity who have access to this rage machine going extremely online.

But we do have a monopoly on the rage machine infecting vulnerable young men who then have access to guns everywhere.

But instead of talking about the real problems, we want to spend time blaming each other.

It's all just incredibly disappointing.

Moving on, in today's episode, we speak with Dr.

Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings, Chancellor of Durham University, and a former U.S.

National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs.

This is the right guest for the right moment.

We discuss with Fiona the war in Ukraine, the state of American foreign policy, and the shifting global order.

Fiona is an inspiration, incredibly smart, measured, qualified, and again, the right person for the right moment.

So, with that, here's our conversation with Dr.

Fiona Hill.

Dr.

Hill, let's bust right into it.

Since we had you on back in March, we've seen summits, meetings, and a total of, wait for it, zero deals agreements made.

Putin seems dug in for total victory.

Catch us up.

What do you think is the state of play right now?

Well, I think you summed it up, sadly, Scott, very clearly.

Putin is dug in.

From his perspective right now, things

are going in the direction that he anticipated.

He didn't think that...

President Trump would really do anything.

He's already sized him up a long time ago.

He knows that Trump's desire to have a good relationship with Putin personally tends to be paramount and that Trump doesn't really want to do any heavy lifting that could create blowback for himself or for the United States in terms of confronting Russia and would rather like to do things directly.

And in fact, now we see President Trump putting pressure on his European allies to go first in terms of taking action against Russia.

And of course, what Putin is also hoping is that those European allies, the UK included, will all fall apart.

And we've seen in the last week all kinds of drone incursions, an uptick in aircraft from Russia violating for quite lengthy periods of time adjacent airspace in the Baltic states and in the countries adjacent to Russia.

And Putin is just applying the pressure.

He really feels that this is his time to finish Ukraine off.

My sense is the war is not going well for him.

And is it when you say finish the war off, is this like the battle of the bulge where it's like, okay, this is our shot.

This is our shot to kind of try and end the war and we're going to throw everything we had it?

Because if I go on TikTok, I can't figure out, all right, are the Russians with a wartime economy and what I would call their core competence, an ability to endure incredible suffering and sacrifice?

And I say that, I generally think it's a core competence.

Wartime economy, willingness to lose, keep going.

Or I hear that 17% of their oil infrastructure has been taken out and they keep, it's a meat grinder.

Give us your sense of the balance of power here and where we are in the war.

Look, all of these things can be true.

And, you know, you say it's a core competence, but when it comes to the Russian people, they're not actually given much of a choice in the matter.

I mean, most states are supposed to be functioning for the benefits of their populations.

It's been quite a while since Putin moved away from putting the population and their prosperity and well-being first.

There was actually a period, to be really fair here, in the two thousands where Russians were living their best lives, where the Russian state was not putting all kinds of onerous burdens on them as it had traditionally, but you know, he's right back at that again.

I mean, although there's not full-on mobilization and there are a lot of inducements for people to go to the front in terms of getting really high payments for the sacrifice, literal sacrifice on the front lines, Putin is still pretty confident that he can keep that meat grinder going and that, frankly, he can fight to the last Ukrainian because he's got got more Russian manpower to be able to push forward.

And look, you've seen President Trump and heard President Trump just recently opining on this, talking about the number of people that Putin is sacrificing and is seeing dying every single day and how much higher that is in terms of a factor of four to one of Russians against Ukrainians.

for example, which is not to say that Ukraine is having an easy time at all.

I mean, in fact, that's what Putin is banking on.

He's banking on Ukraine collapsing first.

He wants to finish Ukraine off first.

So right now, Ukraine is in a rather precarious situation economically.

And Russia is too.

I mean, you're absolutely right about this.

This is a wartime economy.

It's a kind of a variation of the wartime Russian disease, like the Dutch disease, when everything went into their oil economy.

In this case, in Russia, everything is going into the war economy and it's affecting other sectors of the economy.

But Ukraine is literally running out of money.

It's dependent on the IMF.

It's dependent on the support of other allies and partners.

It's been very much dependent on the support of the United States,

not just for military support, but also financial support to keep things going.

We've got this big debate about using Russian assets, frozen Russian assets to help support Ukraine's defense.

And that's now in something of a more acute form because Ukraine's economy literally is

running out of steam.

And that's what Putin is depending on.

He knows that he's got problems at home.

And in fact, you're starting to see even some defections.

We recently heard that Dmitry Kozak,

who is one of the people who's been most close to Putin going back to the 70s and 1980s, somebody who was actually born in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union and Soviet Republic, and one of the people who was opposed to the war and has kept telling Putin the truth about it.

Well, he's just resigned from the government after a long period.

And, you know, that itself itself is quite consequential and telling of where we are now.

But Putin's gambling and betting, and it's a fairly good bet for him that Ukraine is going to be the first country that collapses.

So

you're, I mean, you're handicapping that this, at the end of the day, that Russia has the advantage right now.

Is that accurate?

Well, I actually don't think it has to have the advantage.

Look, this is a game of chicken, right?

I mean, it's, and one, because it's a game of chicken Kiev, because Putin's basically banking on the fact that it's Ukrainians are going to blink or just literally collapse or they're going to turn back or everybody else is going to turn back.

But the point of saying all of this is to say that we don't have to do this.

There are, as I said, serious deliberations right now about doing something with the Russian frozen assets, finding a formula that enables them to be put to use of helping Ukraine defend itself.

I think Europeans are getting more serious about taking action that's required in terms of building their own defense, but helping to make sure that Ukraine can defend those lines and not let Russia go any further forward.

So this is the critical juncture in which a signal has to be sent to Putin saying, no, we're not going to let you do this.

We're going to actually make sure that Ukraine can keep on defending itself and pushing you back.

And we're not going to actually put up with these incursions of drones or aircraft or all the other things that you're going to throw at us here.

There is actually some solidarity in Europe.

It may not be all European countries and you know we can see Hungary and Slovakia and a host of other countries clearly making it obvious that they're not going to do what it takes and that's what gives Putin the confidence that he can push forward.

But if the other major European players, the UK, France, Germany, all the Scandinavian countries, Poland, the Baltic states, etc., push back, that's going to be a different matter.

And we'll have to see now whether these drone attacks, we've had all kinds of evidence now that Putin's doing this to test everyone's resolve.

If they respond with resolve, then we might see something different.

You've just got to show Putin that he can't go any further.

But, you know, again, this is the moment.

This is the testing time.

From an American vantage point, sort of man on the street, if you will,

I'm disappointed that the Americans aren't offering a more full-throated defense or support of Ukraine.

But I'm sort of flummoxed as to why Europe,

who at the end of the day is

the region being invaded here.

And I recognize they've given more money than the U.S.,

but it just seems, for lack of a better term, the EU is just very soft and that Putin recognizes that.

The money, obviously, they would need more money, they would need more money, more weapons.

The idea of ever putting a Spanish or French foot on, you know, boot on the ground is just unthinkable, despite the fact that Europe is being

invaded.

Do you think Europe is mustering the requisite will?

Assuming that the U.S.

will be sort of a, I don't want to call it a passive partner, but will continue to support,

but will not take the leadership position I think most people have come to expect on these types of issues.

Do you think that the EU demonstrates the will to provide the requisite pushback?

Well, look, I think part of the problem that we have is we've got all of these different entities in Europe.

You're talking about the EU, the European Union.

Well, that's not a military organization.

It has military and security components, of course, and it also has a lot of financial clout.

And if you think in aggregate of 550 million Europeans and you think about the financial firepower that they have if they pull all their resources, there's something pretty significant there.

And then, of course, the other organization, the critical one, is NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

And as you said, the US is pretty passive about this at the moment.

We've had the various summits in which it's been made crystal clear by the US Secretary of Defence and many others that the United States is not just going to be offering protection for Europeans unless they're going first, as Trump has also been saying, and they're doing everything for themselves.

And of course, Canada is part of that, but Canada has been seen as feckless by the United States, et cetera.

But there are other forms of organization for military and defense beneath all of that.

in within Europe.

And I think that's where the secret lies.

We're always talking about coalitions of the willing, you know, in different contexts.

And there are other structures.

So, you've actually seen a number of the European countries sign bilateral relationship, bilateral agreements with Ukraine, solidifying those relationships into something that's more just than just political, but something that is also

geared up towards helping Ukraine defend itself.

I was part of the UK strategic defence review that went on, you know, for a whole year up until June, and it was very clear that the UK was seriously committed to trying to help Ukraine and was one of the first movers in terms of signing one of these defence agreements.

But the UK also has a leadership role in another entity

called the JEF, the Joint Expeditionary Force, which, you know, for a long time was neither joint nor expeditionary or even a force.

You know, it was just some guy's name by the sound of it.

But there's actually been some effort to really put some teeth into that.

That is an organization, a military organisation, that was set up really to bring Sweden and Finland into closer coordination militarily with some of the other NATO countries before they joined NATO.

And again, it was the UK, it was Norway, the Baltic states.

And that's something becomes something real now that Ukraine is

a partner with all of these individual countries.

And now that Sweden and Finland have also joined NATO, because the hope is that the GEF could become a military organizational platform for doing something more serious, because all of those countries are both committed and capable, as well as now interoperable, about working together and working with Ukraine.

And when you mentioned boots on the ground, there are Ukrainian boots on the ground.

When we we look beyond all of this,

if Ukraine has managed to prevail, let's just say, and if it hasn't had a victory in the way that people were envisaging it might early on, but it's managed to prevail, persist and resist Russia taking over the rest of its territory, Ukraine and Ukrainian army is going to be probably the most significant in Europe.

which is why Russia wants to have Ukraine demilitarize and have it basically neutralized, because it sees the writing on the wall.

Ukraine's going to be a formidable force.

Ukrainian boots are on the ground.

Ukrainian boots are going to continue to be on the ground.

But what Ukraine needs is more of this technical assistance.

It certainly needs more defensive capability.

And I think all of Europe now is seeing that they need some kind of integrated air and missile defense system too, particularly one in the first instance, defense against drones.

Those drones that recently went into Poland seem to be more dummies, you know, set up to test and to see how Europe was going to respond.

You can't respond by sending up, you know, multi-million dollar aircraft you know to deal with off-the-shelf drones that are partly styrofoam and duct tape so we're going to have to be really thinking creatively here and the ukrainians have also shown the way so what you're seeing now is a group of european countries either through these bilateral agreements or through larger organizational arrangements, figuring out how they're going to work with Ukraine as well

to start taking different technical approaches and boosting their industries, doing more innovation in drones, thinking about how to counteract drones and really working with Ukraine to build up its defense sector as well as their own.

So I think we're going to see more of this.

I think the question is really the pace.

And that's one of the things that you're getting at here.

And then you also see that the US has learned some lessons, but at least the US defense sector and Pentagon has.

And you're seeing a lot of US defense majors wanting to get in on the act there.

There's a bit of a fear of missing out aspect, because the more that the US is pushing Europe to do its own thing, and the more it's evident that Europeans have money, and they're now starting, yes, and will, but they've just got to have the ways and means for this, the more there's also a kind of a concern in the United States and the defense sector that they might not be able to participate in this because you know there's a lot of potential there.

But I think Europeans are going to have to look more at this, you know, smaller-scale innovation, cheaper responses to things, and they are going to have to look at the high-end, you know, exquisite lethal equipment that usually takes you know decades to produce and to conceive of.

So both Poland and Estonia invoked Article 4, which, by the way, has only been used eight times since 1949.

Right.

After Russian jet fighters and drones were intercepted deep into the respective airspaces.

Can you, just as someone who likes to think they're a critical thinker and understands strategy,

I would have thought the last thing he'd want to do is provoke additional resources and spending.

Put us into the mind, to the best of your ability, of Putin and why he made the decision to encroach on Estonian and Polish airspace with attack aircraft.

What is he, quite frankly, what is he thinking?

Well, Putin always looked for vulnerabilities, right?

And Poland and Estonia are pretty vulnerable.

Poland's just starting to build up its defense capacity for itself.

I mean, Poland's actually very close to this 5%, the magical 5% of

GDP.

But it's got, you know, low base to move from.

And the Poles are also still pretty desperate and hopeful for

a stronger bilateral agreement between Poland and the United States.

They still see the United States as underpinning their security, which is why the Polish presidential candidate was recently in the Oval Office, for example.

And Estonia, of course, is a very small country with some disputed territory with Russia, right there on the border with one of Russia's largest military districts.

And And it's always been seen as the point where the Russians would likely make some kind of land incursion, certainly into the Baltic states.

And Putin is just putting up the pressure and trying to see how everyone is going to react.

I think what he anticipated was that everybody would falling out against each other and try to appease him, which has been some of the past patterns.

But there's another aspect to all of this.

is that I'm not really sure about the quality of information intelligence Putin gets himself.

As an intelligence operative, he's somebody who likes to think that he knows everything.

But look, he's now existing in a bubble.

There's all kinds of evidence that he's not always in the Kremlin.

In fact, that he's often in other places.

He's got all these cloned officers that are in his daches, either outside of Moscow or down on the Black Sea, for example.

And I mentioned before that people like Dmitry Kozak, people would say, hey, you know, look, Vladimir Vladimirovich, I don't think this is a good idea.

You know, people like that have either left or they've been sidelined.

So he's not getting people pushing back.

He's surrounded surrounded by yes men or very frightened men, you know, for the most part, and a smaller and smaller group around him who can provide material to him and information.

In fact, he's mostly surrounded by his bodyguards all the time, and you know, it's not very clear that they're all up on the latest information.

So, you've got to ask yourself, what is it that Vladimir Putin's being told, and what does he think?

And what does he decide for himself?

Is he operating on old assumptions based on how he thinks that Poland or Estonia or Finland or the UK or anybody else for that matter is going to react?

And if you think about what he did in February 2022, he made a huge mistake.

He thought that he literally was going to do a special military operation in Ukraine.

He was going to move in.

They were going to capitulate.

Zelensky was going to run off or get killed.

The government would be overthrown and he would put in his own puppet government, some stooges there in Kiev.

And then, you know, all of that would be over with.

And we in the West wouldn't react.

Well, basically, people are reacting.

Perhaps in some ways, in the way they might expect.

We've been following following all these old Cold War procedures for interceptions of planes, etc.

But we're also learning lessons.

And if Putin thinks he can learn a lesson, well, so can everyone else as well.

And now we know there are lots of debates, you know, elsewhere in Europe.

Now, Putin still thinks that he's got his tentacles or his hands into all kinds of European politics and he can pit people against each other.

The Poles and the Germans and the Taurus were always infighting.

Nobody, you know, kind of, he thinks, will really want to help and protect Estonia.

And he's just, you know, fairly confident now that that all these rifts within Europe, politically, internally, in their domestic politics or between Europe and the United States, will prevent any kind of unified response.

But let's see.

I mean, I think that there are again a constellation of European countries, even if it's not all of them, who are now actually getting their act together and they will find ways of pushing back against Putin.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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So I'll put forward a thesis and you respond to it.

There's just enough support from the EU and the U.S.

to ensure that Ukraine or decrease the likelihood that Ukraine collapses.

Russia is paying a huge cost.

They're comfortable paying a huge cost.

They have a lot on the line.

It feels as if if Russia were to collapse or have

just a very obvious defeat, that there's a decent chance that Putin might find a window.

It just feels like it all adds up to the following, Dr.

Hill, that we've got more war for the foreseeable future.

Thoughts?

Yeah, look, I think that's sadly the best assessment.

You know, barring some major changes, if we look back at other similar wars of attrition or the meat grinders,

there was always something either external that happened, some external shock, or in the case of one of the protagonists, an internal shock.

If you look back to World War I, of course, it was

the German monarchy that collapsed, the German state, the first German state.

In the second, it was the defeat of Germany in the battlefield after being pulled out over extended lines for too long and basically not fighting on the home turf.

And of course, Russia is not fighting on its home turf either, even if it tends to present it

as being home turf in the sense that Ukraine is historically part of Russia, as Putin's always telling us.

The other case as well is of some change in the international system.

Now, if we look back a few months ago when Trump came into power, Putin thought that was great because Trump was going to shift the whole thing.

In fact, we were all worried about that as well, that Trump was going to shift the whole course of the conflict in Putin's favor.

And frankly, he has in many respects.

But now, you know, there's a shift again.

So I think absent some major change, some major shock to the system, either externally or internally, we're going to go on with this for some time.

But there could be, of course, a recalculation inside of Russia if all the kind of difficulties mount.

If you're getting, you know, fewer people who are willing to sacrifice themselves on the front, if there's a shock to the economy,

for example,

that constrains Putin's abilities to keep moving forward.

I mean, he can't see much sign of that just yet, but over the next year or so.

It may also be that if he does get enough grip of the battlefield, which plead is what we're looking at right now, that he's trying to take over the whole of the Donbass region, that he might be prepared to settle in some temporary fashion for the lines, frozen as they are.

He's always hinting that there might be some deal to be made over Zaporizhia and Kherson, which are these two other provinces in the south of Ukraine, that Russia partially controls, is laid claim to and annexed them as well, at least in terms of a de facto sense of declaring them part of Russia.

But

Ukraine is still in control of large portions of Zaporizhia and Kherson.

And Putin may then

actually say, okay, I'm willing now to stop the fighting.

And then he might just try to use political and economic pressure on Ukraine instead to find other means of moving forward.

But I don't think it's really shaken in any way his ultimate objectives, which is to get as much of Ukraine and as much control over Ukraine as he possibly can.

But I think he can make a lot of mischief politically in Ukraine as well,

in large part because neither Putin nor Trump are particularly big fans of Volodymyr Zelensky.

And the US itself has also been talking about the need for Ukraine to have a new leader and certainly have another election if we get to the point of a ceasefire and peace negotiation.

So there's all kinds of other ways in which, absent the increase or the persistence of the conflict on the front lines of the battlefield, that Putin can try to get a grip on everything.

And he can continue to keep pressing lots of buttons inside of European politics and the US as well.

I mean, you've seen all kinds of things that the Russians have done lately to try to whip up, you know, sentiment and acrimony and,

you know, basically division within the United States and Europe.

You're a former U.S.

National Security Council official, and

just as an observer, between, and I use this word loosely, the summit in Alaska, where I felt we were just embarrassed,

and between Donald Trump, I would argue, thrusting now what is going to be the largest consumer economy in the world, India, into Russia's hands.

I thought the most chilling photo of 2025 was the picture of Modi, Xi,

and Putin.

It strikes me that what we have done

has done nothing but embolden and build the confidence of Putin.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, I think that's exactly the point, which is why we need to do something different.

I mean, if you're in a hole and you keep on digging, that's, you know, we're just going to end up right at the bottom of

where you've laid out here.

And Modi was doing his own signaling very clearly.

This was at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting that happened to be in China ahead of President Xi presiding over a huge military parade in Beijing to mark the end of World War II in Asia.

And essentially, you know, to kind of pretend that it was China and the Soviet Union and Russia that brought an end to that war, when we actually know, of course, that the United States played a major role in ending World War II in Asia as well, but was very pointedly excluded.

And Modi was basically capitalizing on that ability to signal back to the United States that he didn't take kindly to these imposition of tariffs.

And that gets back to what I said about Trump not wanting to do anything directly to counter Russia, but wanting to do things indirectly.

And he saw India as a weak link and thought he had a lot of leverage over India because of India's desires to have access to the massive

US markets.

I said UK there by a slip of the tongue, but actually that leads to really my next point that I want to make is that India and other countries do have vested interests in other places, not just in the United States.

It's of course true that the United States is the world's biggest consumer market in the sense of the market that everybody wants to gain access to.

And I mean, China, of course, is right there too.

But, you know, traditionally people have wanted to get into the US market to push forward in innovation.

And, you know, they see this as a kind of a testing ground, you know, for their own prosperity.

There's so many reasons to be in the United States.

But those reasons also hold for Europe.

China, India, Japan, South Korea, you know, Russia, less so now because of everything that's been happening, have vested interests in the success of Europe.

As one of my colleagues here at Brookings is writing a book about the future of the world economy, and it's basically pointing out that China cannot pick up the slack.

If the United States takes itself off the scene, China is not going to keep the whole world economy going.

But you know, Europe is obviously a significant place for investment, as well as a significant source of foreign direct investment itself.

India has these strong historic difficult ties, obviously, with the United Kingdom.

But there's a great deal of interest in Europe's success.

So this is an opportunity again for Europe to actually do something differently there and to engage with India, Japan, South Korea, many other countries, and also China to basically say, look,

if this is the direction of travel here, you know, we need to do something different.

But you, in the case of China and other countries, are supporting Russia in a war that is ruining the future prospects for Europe.

And if you want to be part of our success as well, including on all of the different things, but this would go for India rather than China, that we're doing in the military-industrial space, then you need to do something about bringing that war to an end and stop messing about in it.

Because, you know, we're not just a playground here in between the United States and all of you.

I mean, that might be difficult, but

it's one other thing where I see that there could be a way of putting this

in a different direction.

But when we constantly see things as on competition between the US on the one side and everybody else on the other, we then often fail to see where there are other opportunities.

I had read that Ukraine had damaged 17% of Russia's oil infrastructure, and obviously that has different interpretations by what is meant by infrastructure.

Isn't that potentially the key or the solution here that if the Americans and the Europeans were to get serious and give the Ukrainians what they need to take that number from 17 to 18 to 19, just a slow march towards debilitating or kind of defenestrating the oil infrastructure, at which point the economy does collapse?

I mean, this is, I think it's 50 percent of their GDP is related to fossil fuels.

And I realize your geopolitics, but you're also, it's impossible to do what you do without being cognizant of military strategy.

Isn't that arguably the key here?

Well, look, the key certainly is reducing all of the revenue to the Russian state.

And as you point out, oil and gas is pretty critical there in terms of its exports and also the revenues directly to state coffers.

There's already been a reduction in the amount of gas that Russia is selling to Europe, but

oil

remains the key, because in fact, oil is the biggest source of revenues over gas for the Russian state directly.

And oil basically reaches the market from Russia in various different means, either directly.

And look, there were still pipelines for oil.

When the pipeline that was blown up in the North Sea, Nord Stream pipeline, that was for gas.

Russian oil pipelines, including the famous pipeline, Druzeber friendship, you know, still go from Russia directly into Eastern Europe, into East Germany, for example, and into Hungary and other places.

And we've heard the Hungarians say they have no desire whatsoever to stop buying

Russian oil and gas if they can have it as well.

But we're also getting countries like India.

That's why Trump basically imposed those tariffs on India, because I mean, it's recognizing that there are many different ways in which Russian oil meets the market.

It's not just the shadow fleet bringing Russian oil, but it's also other countries buying and refining uh uh the russian oil and uh creating you know refined product and that's another area you know that we really do have to tackle and look european countries like france and many others you know continue to buy russian oil one way or another i mean you can't put some kind of little stamp on the you know hydrocarbon molecules but we we can see you know exactly you know how integrated russian oil still is into global markets but of course that's gonna have not gonna affect you know it's a time when we are worried about the long-term economic health of

the UK, European countries, Germany, and also the United States.

Now, it's easy enough for the United States to say some of these things as well, because the United States remains a major producer of oil and gas.

But some of the other actions would have to require the Saudis being on board, the whole OPEC countries to agree to all of this as well.

So you'd have to engage in some complex diplomacy.

And it's not particularly clear to me right now, so it gets back to some of the problems that we keep identifying here,

that

the major countries that are oil purchasers want to engage in those kinds of negotiations and discussions.

Although if the United States wants to do that directly with Saudi Arabia or other major oil producers,

the consortium should try to keep oil prices down while they put the squeeze on Russia.

And the Russians see this coming.

And of course, they're heavily involved in their own Middle East diplomacy and dealing with the Emirates and the the Saudis themselves.

We'll be right back.

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We're back with more from Dr.

Fiona Hill.

So, speaking of diplomacy, Churchill said that the only thing worse fighting than fighting with your allies is fighting without them.

It feels as if in one fell swoop or just in five or six months, I think of it just as a soccer mom in Madison, Wisconsin, could likely swing the election.

You know, the swing voter, right?

The small number of people that matter somewhere that can tip things have disproportionate power.

It struck me that the new swing votes globally are the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and India.

Big economies, militaries, sort of straddling the fence.

They purposely position themselves as the swing votes.

And just strategically, you really want to be nice to the swing voters.

And it strikes me that in short order, we have taken India, who as an academic, I just am so

upset that we have trashed this amazing connective tissue we've had between, I know, you know, you run a university or you're the, I believe you're the chancellor, is that correct?

That's why I've joined my university in the UK, yeah.

I mean, it's just impossible to go through any world-class university and not find just incredibly talented people from India.

And we had this great connective tissue with India, English speakers, more PhDs than anywhere else in the world, a democracy.

And then the kingdom, we've had military bases, really strong relationships.

And it seems as if we have purposely thrust

India into Russia's arms and somewhat alienated or put a chill on relationships with the kingdom.

I just can't imagine, just to be blunt, I just can't imagine anything more stupid geopolitically to alienate

the forces that have a disproportionate amount of power because of their economic strength, where they sit regionally,

and the fact that they were, quite frankly, kind of up for grabs, if you will.

And I don't mean to put words in your mouth.

So, your thoughts on that,

on those statements?

Well, look, I think that's exactly

the right way to be framing all of this.

Because we're in a period of incredible flux, the international system has collapsed.

Let's just, you know, admit it, even though we've got the UN General Assembly still going on, and there are a lot of countries out there that actually do see some value still in the UN system as a way of being able to mediate, modulate, and actually agree on some collective things.

The United States has

basically declared the system that it built itself dead and is just basically like everybody else jostling for power and the kind of free-for-all that has replaced it.

And in that instance, as you're pointing out here, if the United States is just one of many countries the more you alienate the more difficult you make uh things for yourself and those swing countries you've absolutely accurately point out to india and the um saudi arabia being pretty key there and i would say the all the gulf you know states the emirates uh collectively uh pretty important you've also got brazil which uh president trump you know has taken to task uh for uh basically prosecuting former president bolsonaro who was a personal supporter of trump's you know for basically staging a coup in Brazil.

He's alienated the Brazilians pretty effectively there, too.

He's a large power in the Western Hemisphere, and the Brazilians are not very happy at all by the state of affairs.

And they have international clout too.

South Africa, another, you know, major player regionally.

Trump has absolutely enough ruined that relationship, you know, as well for a whole variety of different reasons.

And, you know, we could go on like this with basically treating everybody with a very heavy hand and forgetting that one of the biggest reasons for US success was soft power and soft power manifested itself in many different ways but also in diplomacy and in the extension of humanitarian aid which has all been abruptly ended to countries around the world so yes absolutely if you look to the future to a system that is already taking on more of regional structures, the United States is the one that's pushing itself into isolation because you've ruptured the relationships with Europe.

There's a new report come out from the European Council on Foreign Relations seeing that the United States is doing more to export culture wars to Europe right now and interfering in European domestic politics than it is to being a defender of the traditional fundamental bases of European democracies and also of their economies, let alone what we've all just talked about, the United States moving away from being engaged in collective defense in Europe.

So in that regard, I mean, the future looks pretty grim from a US perspective.

I think people are going to slowly realize over time that they've done an awful lot to undermine the bases of the United States power

at large globally.

And the United States may well be heading towards being a middle power of

its own

devising.

Because Russia has already declined in a major way in terms of its power from the superpower status of the Soviet Union.

Russia's never really replaced that.

And we've talked about all the problems that Russia is facing.

I would say that this war in Ukraine is going to be, even if it's a victory for Russia, a very

ferric victory, you know, very similar to what happened to the United Kingdom, Great Britain after World War I and World War II, supposedly the pinnacle of achievement and actually the death knell, not just for the British Empire, but for Britain as a really robust policy and economy.

And I think that's where the United States is heading itself.

It really struck me what you just said, that America's biggest export or major export has become culture wars.

That's such an interesting way to summarize that, okay,

we should be selling NVIDIA

GPU hopper chips and Escalades.

And to a certain extent, I think of my industry as being a tremendous export.

You know, we get foreigners to come over and spend half a million dollars at 90 points of margin such that they can hang out in Soho at NYU or at Stanford.

And then now all we're doing is exporting kind of havoc and chaos and making things harder for the leaders.

It feels as if one of the frustrations of being a progressive here in the United States is I feel like there's this enormous vacuum and opportunity in white space for leadership.

And a lot of Democrats are really frustrated that no one appears to be stepping into the void.

I'm sure you're cognizant of, you know,

Governor Newsom got a lot of credit for sort of hitting back, even if sort of a funny, mocking way.

But there doesn't appear to be a lot of leadership pushing back on, quote-unquote, Trump.

Do you see anyone stepping into the void in Europe to show the kind of leadership they need to push back on Putin?

I have trouble identifying.

It just strikes me as an enormous opportunity for somebody to step up and be seen as the leader of Europe right now, at least from a rhetorical standpoint, pushing back on Putin.

Yeah, look, I think it's the same problem in both places.

I do think that leadership can come from unexpected quarters in the United States as well, more from the periphery than it's necessarily going to come from the center.

And that doesn't mean California and the governors, you know, for example.

It can be, I mean, Spencer Cox, you know, just recently has been, I think, modeling great leadership in the wake of, you know, a massive national tragedy and upheaval in the United States.

And we've seen other, you know, kind of moral leaders coming forward, governors of states that people don't mostly think about, Utah's part of that as well.

You're seeing more people in the United States wanting to run as independent for office and coming from unexpected quarters as well.

And I think that's, when you look at Europe, is maybe where we're headed as well.

It's going to be the leaders of countries that we've thought of as more peripheral than the big three of the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

Although you've got a new president in Germany, Friedrich Metz, who's trying to find his position, he's not really being seen right now as a kind of a major force in Germany in the way that maybe Chancellor Merkel was before, though her reputation and legacy have become somewhat tarnished as well as people have looked back, all in the way of previous German leaders really tended to dominate.

And in the UK as well, of course, Prime Minister Starmer is under all kinds of political difficulties and still trying to find his feet to Euron.

And President Macron, you know, his snap election didn't really help.

He's just going through prime ministers in the same way that the UK went through prime ministers, you know, and the previous Conservative government.

And it's really, I think, going to be up to a constellation of leaders from some of the countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland.

You know, for example, it was very interesting when you looked at who came to see Trump in the Oval Office immediately after Alaska.

I think you've got a kind of a sense there that you might have Europe by a kind of a leadership committee.

I mean, yes, Mertz and Macron and

Starmer were there, but you also had Ursula von der Leyen from the European Commission.

You had Mark Rutte from Norway, from NATO, a former president of Prime Minister Azero the Netherlands, but now in his NATO

Secretary General.

And previously, you'd had the Norwegian Secretary General for NATO, who is in the Norwegian government, but you you've also had

Alexander Stubb from Finland.

And, you know, there's an interesting choice as a new member of NATO.

But Alexander Stubb is extraordinarily competent.

Again,

all kinds of previous positions in the Finnish government before becoming president.

But he actually is deeply steeped in the United States.

He studied in South Carolina, he's an amazing golf player, and he's managed to make a connection with Trump.

You also had Georgia Miloni from Italy, who has been an unexpected success story in um her ability to manage the relationship with um trump and has been surprisingly given her background outspoken and supportive of uh doing more for ukraine so if you start to kind of look at this i think you can see that there could be a constellation a group of european leaders who could work together but it's not going to be the big three making those decisions it's not going to be like you know when kiss and juice asks a question who do you call in europe or people used to think well you'd call chancellor merkel or you might have called, you know, way back in the Cold War, you'd probably have called Margaret Thatcher.

It's not going to be like that, you know, anymore.

I think it's going to be groupings of European leaders really working together.

And they clearly coordinated and worked together, you know, very carefully before, you know, they went out to the Oval Office.

So I think you're going to see more of a kind of a tag team development in Europe.

But they're really going to have to take it up a notch.

And frankly, if we go back to the United States, that might be the kind of thing you see here, groupings of governors.

You know, you're already seeing on vaccine mandates, for example.

I I live in Maryland.

I work in Washington, D.C., and I've just paid attention to that the whole of the sort of the northeast of the United States has got together to present alternatives for vaccine mandates.

Same's happening out in California in the West Coast.

And you start on those kinds of issues that obviously have a great deal of importance for public health and you move on from there.

We may see this taking root on all kinds of other issues.

Just as I say, there might be more of these coalitions in Europe starting to do the same thing outside of the military arena, but also in diplomacy.

It's encouraging that you believe there's greater coordination across the EU, because from an outsider standpoint, I just see it as sclerotic.

And everyone has veto power, but no one actually has the power to get anything done.

It's just a lot, it feels like, and it's encouraging for you to say, no, they're more.

I'm misreading that.

Well, I think once you break out of the confines of the European Union itself and of NATO, where, you know, again, also the U.S.

has a major veto of things, You start to see countries using other arrangements.

It's kind of creative, right?

Because you've got all these agreements I mentioned before between countries and Ukraine, but you've also got agreements among themselves.

The UK and Germany, and Germany, and France, and the UK and France have all had major bilateral agreements recently that go beyond just military affairs.

The UK and Norway have as well.

Those two countries are totally entwined together.

70% of UK gas comes from just Norway.

And a lot of the wind

power generation in the UK comes from Norway as well.

You know, it's sort of these ironies of history.

You know, you think about the Viking invasions and now the Norwegians bring wind and gas to the United Kingdom.

But it means that they actually have to look out for each other and their critical national infrastructure is one and the same.

So that's encouraging.

And I think that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, but I can't think of a conflict like this where there weren't central figures who demonstrated just outstanding leadership.

And right now, I would argue the most, I don't know, consequential leaders.

Well, I mean, you always have to list the U.S.

president, but I would argue right now that's not the kind of leadership that's going to help us right now.

I would argue that Putin, Zelensky, and Xi are the most respected and feared leaders, and also the most consistent.

I guess what I'm asking for from you as someone who straddles between a deep understanding of European politics and U.S.

politics,

and who's observed leaders.

Do you see anybody up and coming, either across Europe or in the U.S., where you think if

someone told me that in five or ten years

someone had emerged as a dramatic leader, either as it relates to the war in Ukraine or running for president the next time,

do any, like, who are you most impressed by?

Well, you know what?

It's often people who are right now outside of the elected leadership.

You know, I'd mentioned that I'd actually been very deeply impressed by Governor Cox and the way that he handled, you know, the recent events in Utah.

You know, but I mean, it's not usual for someone from Utah to rise to national prominence and it could quite easily fizzle unless he gets kind of the backing of other governors.

and other elected officials who want to reach out across these partisan divides that

are really pulling us, you know, down and down in a spiral at the moment.

But I do see that there's all kinds of people now coming forward who want to run as independent candidates and kind of expressing their voices.

We may find that the elected leadership of both the Republican, what's left of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, we say what's left of that too, start to kind of get challenged by people coming from the outside.

You get, you know, look, there's an enormous influence from podcasts.

You yourself have a very successful and influential podcast, but we look at all the millions of people who are listening to these and listening to people speak there and who might get ideas, you know, from themselves, hopefully good ones, in terms of going out there and trying to do something more positive to help people, of going out there and trying to make change in local communities, out in regions and in states.

I was recently out in Nebraska for a family wedding.

And one person who's come to my attention who's running as an independent for a Senate race out in Nebraska is

a guy called Dan Osborne, who I come into contact with a few years ago when he was leading

the union at Kellogg's, you know, the cereal plant

out in Nebraska in a strike.

And he just had a lot of really sensible things to say.

It's just like an ordinary guy from the shop floor, former veteran, served in the Navy, you know, who's come out with some just, you know, pretty sensible perspectives on things.

And you see, a whole host of people like this have decided, look, this system is not working for me.

So maybe I'll just try, you know, to go up there.

And even if I don't, you know, succeed in getting elected to public office, he's trying this twice now, at least I might get a movement going of people who want to change things.

And maybe we start by changing things.

in our local areas and our communities and in our regions at the kind of state level you know and that kind of over time starts to force a change you know at the at the center look the federal government's being dismantled the states are pretty much on their own right now as well and you know i think the sinking realization is coming in for a lot of people people, you know, that this isn't quite what they expected that they were voting for.

They didn't think that all of the safety nets, the insurance policies were going to be removed.

And it's the same in Europe.

You know, Europeans absolutely made a huge fundamental error for decades of just relying on the United States and basically outsourcing their security.

It was always a mistake.

And now they've realized it.

And they're going to have to do something different.

And they might not be able to do it at the center with the institutions that they've got.

They might have to do it by coming together in other formats and with unexpected groups of people.

As I said, you know, I think someone like Alexander Stubb in Finland has been

quite the leader.

His predecessor, Salininisto, was also renowned for his leadership.

You have a whole host of other prime ministers and

figures that come from the Nordic and the Baltic countries.

Kaya Kallas, for example, who's the high representative for foreign policy in the European Union, is a former president of Estonia, who have great moral leadership.

And I think that's where we're really going to see change come.

The question is, can it come soon enough, quick enough, given the dire nature of the situation that we face right now?

I'm not that confident, but I am somewhat optimistic that people are starting to rise occasion, frankly, because we've got no choice, because we all go down together under these kinds of circumstances.

So, just just in our remaining time here, you've been very generous with us.

I want to switch tact a little bit or switch gears.

Dr.

Do you have children?

I do.

I have one daughter.

So something we think a lot about here is the struggles of young men.

And I did a ⁇ actually,

the Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary Mayorkos, reached out to me and said, I want to have a discussion.

And we spent the whole time talking about the security risks posed by young men who are searching deeply online and could potentially be weaponized or radicalized by bad actors.

And he was very thoughtful about what does that mean for our ports, our infrastructure, our military.

I'm curious in the context of foreign policy and military policy, have you given any thought to the plight?

And this isn't something unique to the U.S.

We see this across Europe.

that young men for a variety of reasons, biological, economic, sociological, biological, are just not doing as well as they once were and also relative to their female counterparts.

And I always like to add,

we should celebrate and do nothing around the progress of our young women.

But this is a real big issue, I think, in the U.S.

Anyways, I'm going to stop there.

Have you given up?

Yeah, look, I think it's an issue globally, and I have thought about it a lot.

You know, one of my colleagues here at Brookings is Richard Reeves, you know, who set up the whole Institute now for biology.

Boyota and role model.

Yeah, exactly.

And he's extremely good.

I've spent a lot of time talking to him.

Of course, my husband is a man.

So there's also that we talk, we spend a lot of time talking about this.

You know, we also, you know, worry that,

you know, my daughter, you know, who's 18, just gone out of college, just didn't have the same set of male friends that I did.

I mean, many of my best friends growing up were men.

I'm still on list servers with them all.

And, you know,

we talk about this all of the time and

wonder, you know, where is this going to go in the future?

And in the course of the Strategic Defence Review for the UK, we looked at recruitment for the military, we worried about all of these issues, and we worried a lot about

the educational opportunities for young men as well as young women, and how

if we look back over the course of time, those opportunities have shrunk.

The biggest divide, and I think you and I discussed this the last time in our societies is on education between the sixty percent of people who haven't had access to a two or four year college or even vocational training and the 40% that have.

And of course, all of this is changing very rapidly as we get into a world where AI is going to substitute for people and including young men in many of those jobs that people have been diverted to in the past.

I think we have to really start thinking about this across the board as how the whole of society tackles it.

It's not going to be just one easy fix.

It's not just going to be through the educational system.

That is certainly for sure.

But it's going to be having to be, although the K-12 system does need to be changed and adapted to the needs of young men.

As I think Richard and Reeves and many others have pointed out, I have another colleague, Rebecca Winthrop here at Brookings, who's just done a fabulous new book on the disengaged teen, looking at how we really fail kids in middle school, where they all check out.

And that's often when young men get into the very problems that you're talking about in middle school, where they go off into video games and off onto the internet because they're just not engaged at all in school.

And she and others have really been featuring different ways in which you engage people.

You've got to have more efforts out in society for more community engagement.

That's what the tragedy of what's happening now in the United States is we're cutting back on all of these federal programs like AmeriCorps, volunteering, all kinds of other

arenas where we were really trying to help mentor young men.

So, look, this is, I think, absolutely one of the most serious issues that we need to tackle.

And it does have massive security implications.

I mean, look, a lot of the hacking and the cyber hacking that's been happening has been as much from teenage guys as it has been from adversaries like China, North Korea, and Russia, though they've obviously been tapping into that dissatisfaction and grievance.

You know, we see that in the acts of mass mass gun violence, and it's not just in the United States, but in other places where people have access to gun or stabbings or all kinds of

violence, you know, in the UK on the football fields, soccer stadiums, you know, for example.

So I think you're absolutely right in highlighting this.

And I think as societies, we have to have more of a national conversation about what we can do.

But it doesn't mean that we cut away all of those resources.

And again, I think that's where you get into the communities and the local governments.

I'm actually just about to go tomorrow up to Portland, Maine, where there's an amazing set of

community efforts to bring young people in, often featuring

a special outreach to

boys through sports.

And one instance, there's a great organization called Portland Community Squash.

So the game of squash, as opposed to the vegetable, which can cause a bit of confusion.

It certainly did for me when I first heard about it.

I thought, what?

This is about vegetable growing.

But anyway, it's the game of squash.

And you you could do this, obviously, tennis, soccer, football, you know, basketball, you name it.

And they've created a whole community center around this where they bring in the kids and their families, and they start in middle school and they mentor them all the way through.

And the state of Maine provides some support for this, the city of Portland does.

And there's a lot of private donors, and they're trying to take this as an idea across the country as a new version of the YMCA, which was, of course, the Young Men's Christian Association, was also intended to get young men off the street into sports and to more healthy and spiritually guided activities.

So, look, I think there are all kinds of examples out there, but we've got to lean into it and not just, you know, take it for granted that someone's going to deal with it.

Dr.

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow at Brookings, Chancellor of Durham University, and a former U.S.

National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs.

Fiona is also the best-selling author of There is Nothing for You Here, Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, and a leading expert on geopolitics.

Dr.

Hill, I loved when you said that podcasts were beginning to punch above their weight class and have more of an influence.

And I think the reason we're able to do that is we bring out outstanding, thoughtful, fearless guests, and you're one of them.

This is your second time on the show.

Your first one was one of the most downloaded shows we have ever

registered in 400 shows.

So

your work is resonating and we very much appreciate your time.

Oh, thanks so much, Scott.

It's really great to be with you.

Thanks so much.

Algebra of happiness, being extremely online, we think of being extremely online as a diagnosis for for some young man who

is playing video games and online 16 hours a day and then harms himself, harms someone else, or is radicalized or just spends all of his time online doing unproductive things and just has a terrible view of the world.

And there's no doubt there's a correlation between feeling bad about the world and how much time you spend on social media, which I see above said at the top of the show has created a rage machine that is the most profitable machine in history.

But ask yourself if you are extremely online.

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I just went down a rabbit hole online, spending a ton of time on social media and reading stuff, commenting on stuff, producing content.

And last weekend, literally, I noticed I was spending no time with my family or my dogs, which are very, you know, huge sources of mental well-being for me.

I'm getting more cynical, more depressed, more angry, and disconnecting from the real world.

And here's the thing:

the real world, generally speaking, off your screen,

is sloppy, difficult, challenging, and very rewarding in a way that no online

environment, platform, algorithm can replace.

And when I go extremely online and spend too much time online, I find I get very cynical, very angry.

And quite frankly, start just my mental health takes a hit.

And it happens slowly and you don't even recognize it.

And the algorithms will will recognize where you are politically or what you feel strongly about.

It'll pick up on that and as a means of keeping you glued to your screen, start reinforcing those beliefs by making the other side look like evil, monstrous people and getting you more and more cemented in your own beliefs and raging such that you believe that it's the enemy within, that it's your neighbor that's the problem, that it's the other political party that's your problem.

And in fact,

and I'm not suggesting I don't mean to diminish the problems the U.S.

is facing right now, but we look away from what are bigger problems.

Are you, do you have a good relationship with your partner?

Do your kids feel like you're present?

Are you taking care of your health?

Do you have a good relationship with your parents?

Are you making friends?

I mean, that's the shit that's really important.

The thing that ultimately drives the happiness or the lack thereof in your life is your relationships.

And being online a lot, I have found,

creates a certain division or sequesters me from the most important things in my life and the things that keep me sane.

And that is relationships and getting outside and getting in the sunlight and exercising.

So yeah, maybe you don't have to be radicalized.

You don't have to be playing video games 16 hours a day.

But as Darth Vader said, search your feelings.

You know this to be true.

Are you spending too much time online?

And is it getting in the way?

Have you decided that the problems ailing us are so severe?

And have you been kind of fooled by the algorithms into believing that these problems and your views on these problems should diminish the amount of time and effort you put into offline your relationships, exercise, being outdoors?

Or simply put, maybe you haven't been radicalized, but maybe it's lowercase radicalized, and you just need to stop it and do what Governor Cox suggested, and that is

get outside and touch grass.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.

Our assistant producer is Laura Jannair.

Drew Burrows is our technical director.

Thank you for listening to the Propcheapod from Propchen Media.