Dr. Fiona Hill On Putin, NATO and the future of European Security | Durham Union

Right. Well, thanks very much. It's really a great pleasure to be here. I'm sorry if I'm kind of — I feel like this chair is getting on a slant here somewhere. So I'm going to prop myself up a little here because I feel like I can't really see everyone. You've obviously got very comfy chairs that you try to lull your guests into a kind of false sense of security in here. So I'll try to make myself a bit more uncomfortable. So my journey really begins with a parallel period to where we are now. So I decided to study Russian in 1983 against the backdrop of a war scare, and here we are in 2023 in a very similar position with the world on fire and all of us worrying about where it's heading from now. I was, you know, though a kid in a comprehensive school in Bishop Auckland, my dad being a coal miner then working for the NHS as a porter. So it wasn't perhaps the most likely choice of contemplating studying Russian, but you know, it was the moment. Political debates were all about would we end up in a war with the Soviet Union. The popular culture was filled with all kinds of speculations about nuclear armageddon. There were films, there were TV series predicting basically nuclear winter and the end of times. And you know, I have to admit that, you know, like most teenagers of the period, I was quite scared by all this. And you know, one time talking to an elderly relative who fought in World War II and had this really rather dramatic set of experiences, he said to me, 'Well, why don't you study Russian and figure out why they're trying to blow us all up?' So that seemed a kind of logical thing to do back in 1983. So I sat on this quest to try to figure out then how I was going to study Russian because my local comprehensive school didn't offer Russian. It barely offered French and German, although I'd actually managed to pursue that. And I discovered that there were scholarships from the Durham Miners' Association. So this is now a slightly random linkage, but one also very pertinent at the moment. And the Durham Miners' Association have been twinned with the miners of Donbas since the 1920s. And it was basically the miners' strike going back to 1984, and the miners of Donbas and miners around the world raised money in solidarity for miners of County Durham and in fact the UK at large. And as my father had been a miner and pretty much every male member of his family, it turned out that I was entitled to a small educational grant from the Durham Miners' Association, and it came from the miners of Donbas. So I actually had my first break in studying Russian. I got money to go on a course to the University of Bangor for a summer with money from the miners of Donbas. So there's a kind of a certain strange circularity with everything that we're talking about and dealing with today. Donbas was then, of course, it was always part of what was Ukraine, but it was the heartland of Soviet industry and of course was part of the Soviet Union. Most people probably hadn't really registered, I think myself included, that this was part of Ukraine and now would be the focal point of not just the invasion of Russia but the war. I mean that basically what we think now about the front lines and Avdiivka and all these other places that we now don't read quite so much about in the press, it's right there along in the Donbas. So it's that early inquiry, the timing of the moment that led me first to decide to study Russian. And the rest of it is really all about being in then not just the wrong place at the wrong time, but the right place at the right time. Basically getting admitted to St. Andrews University in Scotland, discovering I could take Russian from scratch there on the back of this summer program, getting a scholarship to go to the Soviet Union in 1987, 1988, just as Gorbachev and Reagan are — they just signed the INF treaty ending the Euromissile crisis that had worried me so much back in 1983, 1984, and they're meeting all kinds of Americans during the Gorbachev-Reagan summit of June 1988. I heard Reagan speaking at Moscow State University. It wasn't really a Q&A like this; it was him giving a lecture about, you know, that basically was the precursor to him, you know, talking about the new relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. So I saw him and Gorbachev walking around on the walkabout on Red Square, and I met an American professor who told me there were scholarships to Harvard University, which there still are, by the way, for anybody who's thinking about graduate work. And I got a scholarship to Harvard to study in what was then the Soviet Union program. I end up getting a degree in Soviet studies, and within a couple of months the Soviet Union disappeared. So I'm trying to figure out what to do my degree in. I pivot to history. I do a history PhD, and really one thing basically leads to another. It's all about timing. And I would actually suggest that many of you here might end up on the same sort of path because it's what's happening around you and it's opportunities that get opened up by education. It's hearing somebody else tell you all kinds of things are possible. And I end up working at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as well, meeting lots of different people there, and that becomes my first pathway into government. Anyway, so it sounds like I'm reading out my resume here, but it's actually a whole series of fortuitous events and timing that really shape this path, as unlikely as it is coming from Bishop Auckland and ending up in the White House.

Yeah, I told this story a bit earlier with the diplomatic society that I'd actually applied after my master's degree at Harvard to work for the Foreign Service — I mean, for the Foreign Office — and they lost my application down the back of a radiator. So thanks to that slip, literally, I wasn't able to, you know, basically get a place. It's this classic: every three years they opened up these positions in the research department of the Foreign Office, Eastern Research, and I'd got down to the final selection, had to send everything in, they lost my application. If I had gone down that path, I might still be there and about to retire because most of the people that I've met stayed in those jobs for life. So that's always one thing. I might have still been in government somewhere, but probably behind the scenes being, you know, an analyst. And I just recently did a briefing with the same department for the soon-to-be UK ambassador, Nigel Casey, to Moscow. And I was sitting around the table thinking, 'Wow, if it hadn't been for my materials going down the back of the radiator, I might have been just orchestrating and inviting, you know, other people in to come and talk there.' So it's not impossible that my pathway might have, you know, led into similar sorts of direction. But I think by going to the United States it was kind of a fresh start. I mean, for all of you and people probably come here from — I'm sure there's some Americans here who've come the other way — and you get a chance for reinvention. But you know, America used to be the place that you could reinvent yourself and start things from scratch. And honestly, when I got to America, no one could place my regional accent. And in fact, I had surreal conversations of people saying, 'Oh, you sound just like the Queen.' I'm like, 'I don't. I really don't.' But that's totally fine. I'll take it. You know, so it was an opportunity to be, you know, in a way a different person and to sort of start again because people weren't asking me all the questions they always ask here about where you're from, what school did you go to, what's with that accent, how did you get here? They were just more excited that you were a British person. There was definitely this special relationship, you know, then in terms of Americans being just really excited at meeting British people over in the 1980s.

Well, if you might recall, during his first encounter with Putin, Bush famously looked into his eyes and saw a man he could do business with. He tried to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher. But other people around Bush, of course, made fun of him terribly about that and said, 'Well, yeah, we looked into his eyes and we saw KGB, KGB, KGB.' So, you know, Bush, by the time I was working at the National Intelligence Council doing briefings for him, had quite a lot of remorse about that initial encounter in Slovenia and kept trying to explain that he was just kind of looking to make a connection, but realizing that he'd been played by Putin. I mean, I'm sure many of you know the story already, that Putin had definitely done his homework on Bush, but actually Bush was at something of a disadvantage because in the early stages of Putin — I mean, now it's hard to think because he's been in place for 23 years. But if you think back to the early 2000s, we didn't know very much about him. And in fact, Putin has spent an awful lot of time trying to hide as much of his background as possible because he likes it when you don't know much about him, because then he can, you know, play you off against other people. He can delve into your background, meaning whoever the 'you' is, the you who comes across his way, because his whole experience in the KGB was one of trying to turn someone into an asset, looking at what buttons they could push, what the vulnerabilities might be, and what he could get out of a relationship, trying to manipulate people to get them to do things that they wouldn't normally do or things that he wanted them to do. So when he first met Bush, he knew a few things about Bush. First of all, he knew that Bush had had a drinking problem when he was younger. Bush was very open about this and that he had basically treated his alcoholism not just, you know, through Alcoholics Anonymous but also by embracing religion. And so he was a born-again Christian. This was very important for him. And Putin tries to make this connection, in fact does it very successfully initially with Bush, by telling him a story about himself. And again, all these stories just come from Putin. So who knows if they're true? Remember, this man lies for a living. It's not a character flaw. It's what he does in manipulating people. So he tells Bush that there'd been a — that he had, as a young man, been baptized by his mother and grandmother in secret, that they'd given him a cross for his baptism. And then much later, a family home of Putin's had burned to the ground, and the only thing that had been saved from the fire was this cross. And he dramatically whips it out of his shirt. There's little singe marks on it, you know, for effect. And of course that is the connection that he makes with Bush. And so he begins to play Bush after this. And it's after this encounter with basically Putin telling Bush all about his own, you know, Christianity and his embrace of this that basically Bush tells everybody that this is a man essentially, as Margaret Thatcher thought about Gorbachev, that he could do business with, and a man who was a patriot of his country. I mean, Putin is a patriot of his country, but he's also a KGB operative. Somebody who is, you know, as we might kind of say, Hogwarts tour here, schooled in the dark arts. Very much kind of a black ops guy, and his whole job is about manipulation. That notwithstanding, through those very, you know, first few years of the Bush presidency into the second term, as you suggest, there was still a focus on trying to kind of make a go of the relationship with Russia. When things really shift, and that's when I was actually in the position at the National Intelligence Council, is the war with Ukraine — with the war with Georgia, rather, in 2008, almost at the point we thought might be a war with Ukraine, because this all comes against the backdrop of the decision, particularly by Bush, to really try to push for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO in April of 2008. I mean, we can talk about this as we kind of go on there, but that becomes a kind of, in a way, a pivotal point when Russia then invades Georgia, and there's a kind of a realization that maybe this relationship isn't at all on an even footing. In fact, there've been many hints before this. In 2006, the Russians had turned off gas to Georgia after the Orange Revolution. Thinking back again to that kind of period where there had been a pushback against the election of Viktor Yanukovych, who was seen as a kind of pro-Moscow candidate in Ukraine, and you know, one of the very many grassroots rebellions in Ukraine. Putin always thinks that everything is orchestrated from on high, coming from the KGB. He doesn't believe that individuals and populations have agency, either individual or collectively, and that everything is decided from the top or manipulated by the security services. So he was convinced that what was really, in fact, a spontaneous reaction to corruption inside of Ukraine was in fact something orchestrated by the CIA. And so you also get then in 2007 the infamous speech at the Munich Security Council by Putin, also putting the US on notice that Russia already sees its relationship as shifting. So the shift doesn't really come from the US perspective. The shift is really coming from Russian — from Putin reassessing the relationship. And it's only when you get the invasion of Georgia that the kind of US has a bit of a jolt and starts to kind of wake up to the fact that maybe this relationship is shifting. Nonetheless, there is a lot of continuity in policy in the United States. When Obama comes in, he tries to reset the relationship. People will probably recall that at this point Putin has made a shift from being president to prime minister. He's still absolutely right there in the thick of things. But the Obama administration tries to basically tell itself that Putin is not in charge. They've got a fresh start, a possibility with Dmitry Medvedev, who at the time, certainly not now, was a warmer, fuzzier, gentler version of Vladimir Putin. You didn't think he was going to have poisoned your water or your tea. You know, you could have a normal conversation with him. And there was kind of a hope then of, again, you know, with Medvedev, Obama doing the same that Bush had done with Putin earlier on, of thinking that the relationship could be put on a different footing. So that whole period from Bush to Obama, there's a certain, let's just say, aspirational optimism about the relationship, certainly on the US side of things.

No. So in fact the signs were there much earlier, to be honest, even before Putin. In the early 1990s, you get a shift under Yeltsin in '92, '93, when more kind of hardliners, who, you know, were very much in the camp of people just like Putin, who were bemoaning the collapse, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, already got Ukraine in the crosshairs. This is in the period when Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus had inherited nuclear weapons after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. You know, suddenly there was a proliferation of nuclear states because of the stationing of so many of the long-range strategic as well as intermediate and tactical nuclear weapons across the Soviet Union, and again with concentrations in Belarus, Kazakhstan, where we also had, you know, the space launch and a lot of testing in Semipalatinsk, and then Baikonur, the space launch facility for the Soviet Union, was all in Kazakhstan. And then with Ukraine having a pretty sizable arsenal. And actually, when I was a much younger scholar working at the Kennedy School of Government in the early 1990s, there was a group of us wrote a report called 'Back in the USSR' — not exactly very original, of course, picking the kind of Beatles title — but it was really about how there was a great concern even then that there would be pressure put on Ukraine and other states to pull them back into the Soviet Union because of all the Russian speakers, you know, the so-called Russians in the near abroad, 25 million Russian speakers in Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan and, you know, elsewhere across the Soviet Union, but also because there were so many people who didn't believe that the Soviet Union should have fallen apart. And in the early 1990s, there's a lot of pressure put on Ukraine that's not that dissimilar from what we see later. Accusations that the Ukrainians are going rogue — they weren't being called Nazis, but that the Ukrainians were, you know, basically spoiling for a fight, that they might use the nuclear weapons, that they couldn't be trusted with them. And actually, we advocated in the report that it wasn't a very good idea for Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons. It made us terribly unpopular because at that point, including my old boss at the Kennedy School, Graham Allison, and many others who'd gone into the government, were trying to basically denuclearize other former Soviet republics. So they were worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, so-called loose nukes, particularly getting into the hands of terrorists or into kind of rogue actors, and they wanted to make sure that they were all basically taken back to Russia and dismantled. And so there was kind of — these were kind of contradictory impulses, but there were already signs then that Ukraine would come under pressure and that, you know, keeping nuclear weapons might have been, or at least one or two, a kind of an insurance policy. And then you recall that the Budapest memorandum was signed in 1994 by the United States and the United Kingdom along with Russia, guaranteeing or giving assurances, a guarantee of Ukraine's territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty, precisely because there was already some concerns that Ukraine would be put under pressure. The idea was to get Russia to commit to this as well. So all I'm saying here is that there's actually a long thread, and part of the problem is that Putin has been in place for all this time, from since 2000 to 2023. Many of the people around him have been around all the way since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and in fact some of them were involved in the coup against Gorbachev. Remember Mr. Surovikin, who was one of the generals who was put in charge of the campaign in Ukraine, who got basically shafted to one side because he was a little bit too supportive of Mr. Prigozhin during recent events. Surovikin, as a young colonel, was part of the coup against Gorbachev, also of the hardliners who wanted to keep the Soviet Union in place. So if you start to put all the threads together, you can see that we should have been much more mindful of what was happening. And the problem is that we don't have a lot of continuity in either UK or US politics. In the UK there's a lot more. If I'd been in the — going back to my thing in the Eastern Research Division, I would have been on there all the time with a lot of the people, you know, who were already looking at this. But in the US context, you have too much changeover. So Putin has outlasted, you know, multiple presidents, multiple national security officials, all kinds of people in the State Department. Of late, of course, he's outlasted a lot more. There's so many shuffles of government everywhere else that everyone loses the plot and loses the thread. But people like Putin have not. So I think our biggest problem was that we just could not keep that continuity of attention to Putin, the people around him, bearing in mind that a lot of these people had not changed their views since, in fact, the early 1990s. And again, remembering that Putin himself said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century. He didn't just mean the Soviet Union itself. He also meant the Russian state and the Russian Empire.

He's not irrational. And he's not mad, but he might be out of touch. So, for Putin, all of the various explanations for why he's doing it, I mean, all hold true. He has this desire to not recreate the Soviet Union, but certainly to pull back what he thinks of the core lands of the old Russian Empire. He's made that very clear. He actually believes that Ukrainians and Belarusians, and in fact all Russian speakers, are Russian. And you know, 90% of the population of Kazakhstan actually spoke Russian at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but they certainly weren't all ethnically Russian. But you know, as far as Putin is concerned, it's a little bit like the French in the view of, you know, the French civilization, that if you are Francophone, you know, you're kind of part of a larger whole. Putin also thinks the same thing. He is a kind of a statist, thinking, seeing the continuity of the Russian imperial state all the way through the Soviet Union to the modern day. So you could also be a Chechen and a Tatar, but then that means that you are still part of that larger, you know, Russian civilization. If you deny being part of that, then you are a radical nationalist. Hence his view and depiction of the Ukrainians as Nazis, because during World War II there were, of course, you know, Ukrainian nationalist partisans who — some, not a huge number — but who fought, Latvians as well and Lithuanians and others, who fought alongside the Nazis to push, you know, back the Soviet Union because they did not want to be part of, you know, this continuity of the Russian Empire. So Putin has this great Russian view in which he thinks that Ukrainians and Belarusians are just sort of part of the same polity, the same culture, the same history. They're just, you know, part of Russia — little Russians, white Russians, and others who are part of the larger Russian civilization. He also sees, you know, Russia, frankly, as a great power politically, not just in the kind of ethnic, cultural, historical sense, and that Russia has the right to be one of the major poles of activity globally in international affairs alongside China. Putin believes that there are only a handful of sovereign states in the world. The United States, maybe less so than it was before. European countries in joining the European Union, certainly a lot less. And really, you know, China and Russia, and any state can defend itself and doesn't have to ally with others. Putin thinks that actually alliances and partnerships are dead weight, that they're a sign of weakness, not in fact a sign of strength. And so Putin is also very ambitious for Russia itself as a major player. And then he — I don't think he started off as being anti-American, to be frank. I think over time he evolved into thinking, particularly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, that the United States was a dangerous country. Many other people would agree with him. That, you know, needs to be contained somewhere, and that Russia has to be a counterbalance. And I think he's decided, certainly of late, that his goal is to really weaken the United States, break the kind of bonds of the United States with European and other actors, and to see the United States, if not marginalized, in world affairs. An awful lot of actions that, you know, Putin has taken, you know, I say over the last year, that the war in Ukraine has morphed into a kind of proxy war against the United States for Putin. And you can see that even more in the rhetoric. I don't — that's certainly not where it started off. But when I said in terms of out of touch, I just want to talk about that for a moment. I think Putin had a really bad period of COVID, which is not because he got COVID, but because he became isolated. And lots of people have talked about this, and I think there's a lot of evidence pointing in this direction that he went on some pretty unhealthy paths during that period. Many of us did too. I mean, all kinds of tragedies that people experienced, and the isolation was not good for Putin because he's already somebody who believes in his own counsel. You know, having been someone who's, you know, famously attempted and failed miserably to, you know, brief someone like Donald Trump, you can imagine it's also pretty difficult briefing Putin. Putin's an intel guy. He's somebody who wants the raw material, the information. Again, like I said before, he believes it's the people at the top that decide everything, not the people, the larger dynamics. And so he gets convinced during this whole period that part of his legacy after 20-odd years being in power is to bring back these Russian lands to the fold. And he's sort of thinking about his next terms in office, and he's thinking up to 2036 basically. And he's spending a lot of time in the archives. He actually tells outgoing Chancellor Merkel about all the things he's found in the archives of the Kremlin. So it's a bit like going across the library over there and then, you know, getting your whole worldview shaped by, you know, books from the 17th century. That's essentially what he does. Putin is of the view that any territory that Russia conquered legally belongs to Russia, particularly if the treaties that were signed recognizing that treaty were never — that land accruing to Russia were not abrogated. And actually, if you start looking back over Russian history, a lot of the treaties were never formally abrogated, but they just might have been changed by conquest or by circumstances. So Putin kind of goes back, and you might remember at one point he's brandishing a map with the head of the Russian constitutional court, saying Ukraine's not on this map from whatever, you know, period it was. Ukraine was, of course, on the map, but in different forms, because part of Ukraine was under the Ottoman Empire, the Swedish Empire at different times, and Russia wouldn't have been under that format, and the United States was probably not on that map of the world at that point. Germany wouldn't have been, neither would Italy. You know, you think about the history of the world, there are very few countries whose borders haven't changed. And so Putin is of the view that he can change all those borders back again, pick a particular historical period. And he basically formulates that during his time in COVID isolation. And then you think about it, he's not getting any information because he's sitting here and people are coming to brief him, sitting at the back, you know, the distance at the back of this room. I mean, I know from my own experiences of briefing presidents, maybe get about five or 10 minutes to get your points across before they interrupt you or, you know, they're asking you all kinds of, you know, different questions, they're just ignoring you and not really listening. So imagine that people are trying to counter whatever view that Putin has basically formulated at this point about Ukraine. Many of them not even in the loop of the way that he's thinking about things. His essays that he writes about Ukraine are probably ghostwritten by the culture minister, Mr. Medinsky, you know, edited then by himself, that they're, you know, trying to kind of interpret his own thinking about things. And as it gets towards his decision to go into Ukraine, he's really being guided more by close associates, so people who are linked into the political and oligarchical circles in Ukraine, and nobody's telling him anything different. He doesn't factor in the Ukrainian people. That's what I mean about being out of touch. He rarely factors in the Russian people, apart from he's a bit obsessed about polling. But he's not hearing anything contrary to his idea that he could launch then a special military operation and that Ukraine would capitulate within a week to two weeks, and nobody's telling him anything contrary. So he's out of touch. But his rationale, you know, is actually pretty sound in many respects because if we think back to 2014, he's already taken Crimea without, you know, basically much of a whimper from the rest of the world. He invaded Georgia with little response. He's done all kinds of things, poisoned people all over the place, knocked people off, all kinds of actions that have had very little pushback. So his assumption would be, quite rightly from his point of view, that nothing was going to happen. In fact, he told some senior officials from various European countries a couple of weeks before the invasion, by which time it was pretty clear to the United States and others that something was going to happen, that he had bought Europe off and that nothing would happen. He was convinced that Germany would do nothing because of energy. I think he's been pretty shocked by a lot of the reactions, particularly in the first few months and the first year to the invasion of Ukraine, not least the Ukrainians fighting back.

I'm smiling because I actually have a huge scar on my tongue where I bit it really violently to stop myself from letting loose an expletive when I got a phone call because I wasn't expecting it at all. I'd actually gone in to have a couple of discussions thinking that, you know, I was just basically giving some advice to a few people I'd worked with before, and when I got a phone call, you know, basically saying, 'Well, actually, would you take the job?' I said I was so shocked I bit my tongue. Anyway, that's — some of you will be in that kind of position, you know, later on. Just make sure you are a bit careful about how you respond because it was a shock in many respects. And then, you know, obviously I had to really think long and hard about do I do this or not. But the way that it came about was I'd been in the government obviously before as national intelligence officer. I'm politically neutral. I don't belong to a political party. I've never taken part in a campaign. And I'd worked with a lot of people who ended up by accident on then, you know, the final stages of Trump's campaign because, as you might have noticed, he didn't really have a Russian policy team. And in fact, it was very obvious that, you know, there was quite a lot of problems with his attitudes towards Russia. I didn't actually believe that he'd been colluding with the Russians like a lot of people seem to. He didn't seem like to be the kind of person to collude with anybody, really. He was very much, you know, focused on himself, and also that's not the way that the Russians were. Putin would never actually collude with anybody. He would certainly try to influence and manipulate people, and, you know, there were certain people who had gone to visit Trump in Trump Tower, but I knew who they were and they weren't really kind of serious people. But it was quite obvious that — and we all knew that Putin and the Kremlin were interfering in the election. But it wasn't obvious in any way that Trump had been elected by the result of Russian interference. But it was more about how were we going to deal with the very fact that Russia had interfered in 2016. So, you know, when I was first approached by some of the people I'd worked with previously in the National Intelligence Council, they were kind of hoping that I would get some time to go in and talk to some of the people in the campaign and just, you know, talk about the past and how we've got to this point. So, you know, I dutifully did that. And then, you know, actually, it was General Flynn who asked me to join the administration. And I'd worked with him previously on the issue on Georgia in 2008. So he was the intel guy for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was Admiral Mullen, and he was my direct counterpart. So I was the same seniority in the same position as him, and I was the mission manager for dealing across the government with the response to the war in Georgia. So I worked with him really closely, and he was a very different person from how he appeared in the campaign. I mean, I genuinely wasn't sure if it was the same person. I kept pinching myself, thinking, how can this be the person that, you know, I worked with then in this role? And again, he brought in a number of people I'd worked with previously in the intelligence community, and they were the people who approached me for this. I did do a lot of soul-searching about it, given everything that we knew. I didn't think this was going to be an easy position, but I also started to think, okay, so the house is on fire. We've had the Russians interfere in the election. We've had this crazy outcome, you know, by somebody who's been elected by a tiny sliver of the population. You know, the country's, you know, essentially on fire here, and, you know, I felt some responsibility to do something. Otherwise, why have I been, you know, preparing all this time working on Russia? I know all of these things. I know these things are going to happen. You know, I should do something. But I, you know, in talking to a number of colleagues, I mean, some people told me that if I went to work, they would never speak to me again. A couple of them haven't, because they said you'd be kind of embracing all the things that happened, and I was pretty determined I wasn't going to, but that, you know, I respected that that was going to be their view. And others said, look, you've got to leave if you think you're going to be part of the problem, not the solution. If you get to a particular point where, you know, you really think that you're just, you know, going in circles or that you're contributing to really terrible things happening, just by being there and being an enabler, you've got to leave. And I actually left one week before the infamous phone call. And I'd actually stayed longer than I was going to. I was going to leave in March or April of 2019, and I ended up, you know, leaving in July because I was asked to stay on a little bit later until we could kind of get other people in place because it was still in the kind of phase where people thought they could kind of, you know, contain Trump. It was a bit like working on the Chernobyl sarcophagus. You know, it was kind of people were getting frazzled up and, you know, terrible things were happening. And there was a kind of a sense — I mean, one very senior official said to a group of us once, 'The republic's in trouble. We've got to do whatever we can. We will never speak of this again.' I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up. So there was kind of this really heavy feeling that we had to do, you know, do something. And I still feel that sense of responsibility speaking out against him. And as you may notice, even people who were close to Trump and, you know, with a few exceptions, of course, and, you know, thought that they could make a go of it with his presidency, are speaking out against him. So, for example, what Chris Christie has been saying on a recent trip, you know, to Israel. Mike Pence, who was, you know, one of the most loyal, you know, vice presidents you could possibly have, you know, speaking out against Trump as well. I mean, it wasn't, I think, immediately evident to everybody. And it took me a couple of weeks in there to realize that this was going to be even more difficult than I anticipated. But it was that kind of sense of real anxiety and angst most of the time throughout that things were really going awry.

The discussion between Trump and Putin before that was kind of normal. I mean, I know you're all kind of thinking, what does that mean, normal? But in the larger scheme of things, it really was. And people have got to remember that Trump and Putin are never alone because Trump can't speak Russian and Putin speaks some English, but not well enough to have a conversation. So there are always interpreters. And the US interpreter who was in that meeting was probably the very best interpreter we've got, who has interpreted for US leaders with Putin for the entire 20 years and probably knows Putin better than anyone because they've heard him speak over and over and over again, and he knows who they are, and there's all these interactions. And so they were completely on top of what had happened, reported back. I mean, there were a few glitches, a few things where Putin was doing his usual trying to play Trump, and, you know, we were forewarned about that, but we couldn't have really then anticipated completely the whole way that the press conference would unravel. And there'd been some modest agreements in the meeting. The National Security Councils were going to have an exchange and have more regular meetings to try to talk about the sort of strategic relationship between the two countries, you know, despite by this point all the sanctions and things that have been put on Russia. There was talk about, you know, potentially even having a business dialogue again, despite all the things that were happening. But most importantly, there'd been an agreement to move forward on arms control. And that was just something that I think is really not understood about Trump. Trump was actually really focused on trying to continue the arms control issues of the 1980s. He was kind of a 1980s guy. And weirdly, he was probably motivated by the same things that I've been motivated in deciding to study Russia back in 1983. Trump was really, I think, you know, quite scared about the power of nuclear weapons and the possibility of kind of nuclear armageddon as well. He actually talked frequently about the Cuban Missile Crisis when he was obviously a much younger person, but also he didn't call it the Euromissile Crisis, but the kind of the crisis of the 1980s. And he had actually — this is quite weird — tried to volunteer himself to be an arms control negotiator to the US government because he was so convinced that he was such a great dealmaker that he wanted to sit down. He first of all — Richard Nixon, but then later, you know, with Reagan and George H.W. Bush, he actually stopped Gorbachev on a trip to New York trying to kind of sit down with him. So he was obsessed with this idea that he'd have a moment with Putin and then all arms control would be resolved. He'd given interviews to Playboy, I understand, about this in the past. And what we had was sort of subliminal references to all of this the whole time in Helsinki with the Finns. We were showing reels behind the scenes of meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan and H.W. Bush and Gorbachev just to kind of, you know, create the mood for arms control. And so they'd actually had a sensible conversation about this. Trump was actually focused on issues related to nuclear weapons because he was interested in it, and he actually — I mean, he thought he knew more than he did. He was always talking about an uncle of his who was an MIT nuclear physicist. He thought that he understood fusion because of, you know, genetic, you know, relationship, and he probably didn't, but he definitely taken on board all of the briefings that he had about the power of nuclear weapons. He was always talking about it, and so he really felt that he could move on forward with Putin. And so we'd had this agreement that we'd have these arms control discussions, and it all went out the window. Remember, there's one point in the press conference when, you know, people said, you know, 'Do you think you've changed the relationship with Putin here?' And he said, 'Yes, you know, I think I've, you know, turned the clock back.' And he's thinking of the Doomsday Clock. He was convinced that because he'd sat down with Putin and they'd had a good vibe — at least he'd had a good vibe — that, you know, now we were, you know, more minutes away from midnight from the Doomsday Clock. He was trying. He thought he should get praise for that, and instead he gets a lot of questions about Russian interference, and he's mortified by this because, I mean, Trump is a very insecure person, and the idea that he might be a loser and he might not have won the election on his own. He was always talking about his wonderful campaign. The fact that there was just that chance that maybe, you know, Putin had won the election for him, even though it was actually Americans who voted for him, and because of the Electoral College. He always was trying to deflect that. And you see him and you hear him deflect it in the most bizarre way, you know, rejecting what the security services had told him, his intelligence chiefs, trying to pretend that maybe Ukraine had done it, talks about the CrowdStrike server. It was just all over the place. And next thing you know, he's basically saying he believes Putin more than everyone else. And even Putin, you could tell at that moment, thought, 'Oh, that's gone too far.' And on the way out of the press conference, Putin says to his press spokesman, Mr. Peskov, 'What a show.' I mean, he basically says 'blyad' in Russian, which kind of roughly translates to — because he knew that then there would just be all of these...

consequences. And although he was obviously relishing the fact that he was the president of the United States, putting him above all of his intelligence people, he actually wanted to move forward with some of these small agreements as well. At that point, Putin wasn't playing the rogue nuclear actor that we see him playing now. He actually did want to have arms control talks on his terms, of course, and he wanted to get the extension of New START, for example. He wanted to move into a different pathway at that point. He didn't necessarily, you know, kind of want the United States to be pulling out of INF, and he wanted to have an anchor to the United States on nuclear weapons, and everything just went out the window after that press conference because it was so terrible. And the mood was, as you can imagine, it was like Gallaher's, you know, mood. We were like, 'Oh my god, we've just been humiliated in front of the whole world. There's not much coming back from that.'