An Election Day Conversation with Dr. Fiona Hill | Durham Cathedral Institute Talk

Well, and actually, can everyone hear okay? No, no, I didn't... Yeah, we kind of... Can you hear okay? Yeah. Does that... Is that better? Yeah. I think Philip's got a little bit of an assist from above here in terms of volume, that obviously he's not working for me too well. But I've got lots of microphones on, and we have our colleagues here from Palace TV. I hope they can still hear with a microphone. Right, very good. And people can hear at the back? Yes. Great. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I mean, it's just always a pleasure to be here, and especially here in Durham Cathedral, which is somewhere that is extremely dear to me from being a child. And in terms of the connection to the miners and the mining banners, my father, by the time I was born, was no longer a coal miner. However, my great-grandfather, Thompson Hill, and actually some other grandchildren of Thompson Hill are here. I can see my cousin Kathy sitting here, you know, for example. And anybody who's called Hill in County Durham is probably related to us, because one of our great-uncles had a lot of children. So if you look around and there's a Hill, it's probably one of our cousins. And there was multiple generations of the Hill family worked in the mines around County Durham, you know, basically going back to the mid-19th century. And that identity of coal mining, the identity that's rooted in all of the communities around County Durham, I think somebody in our family must have worked in almost every pit village in different parts of the county. Really did make an impression everywhere you went. For example, we usually go everywhere on the bus because nobody had a car in my family either. We'd go on the bus and we'd go through various pit villages, and my dad said, 'Well, cousin here, you know, worked here, or uncle this worked here, or your aunt here, you know, was here.' And there was always that sense of being deeply rooted. But unfortunately, I mean, by the time that I was born in the mid-1960s, my dad had already lost five jobs because the coal mines kept closing, and he'd move from one mine to the next, and they kept getting further and further away. So we couldn't walk to the next job; we'd have to take, you know, a bicycle or the bus. He worked in a brickworks. The brickworks closed down because that was tied to the mine. Then he worked in one of the local steelworks. Surprise, surprise, that closed down as well, one of the mini steelworks. And then he ended up working in the other great anchor institution of the Northeast, the National Health Service. And so actually, for most of the latter part of his career, after being a coal miner at age 14, he was working in the National Health Service, but as a hospital porter. And that was actually, you know, for me also very formative, because so many people who worked in the mines, you know, for many of the people here, their ancestors, some distant, some closer, once the mines closed, there wasn't really something logical else to do because the training wasn't there. Which is why when I look around and I see people from the local schools as well as people here at the university, why education is so important. And the miners and the Durham Miners' Association really put a lot of emphasis on education. But unfortunately for the people of my father's generation, that just really wasn't available. They were kind of like the last generation, the people who hit their 30s and then their 40s and onwards when the mines closed down, and they basically were then looking for any kind of work that their skills were vaguely transferable to. So in my dad's case, he could push things, you know, because he'd been pushing coal tubs down the pit, and so as a porter, he was basically pushing people, a lot lighter, obviously, than a massive coal tub, you know, from basically, you know, one ward to the other, or, you know, kind of basically around the hospital. And that gave me a kind of a, you know, a real sense of how the region in that kind of period became somewhat disconnected, and there was that feeling of loss of opportunity that really, I think, shaped a lot of my own desires and aspirations to get an education and then, you know, later on to try to give something back.

Well, it's interesting, Philip, because you also studied Russian, you know, and German in the same, you know, kind of rough period. It was very much shaped by world events. I mean, very much like now, we were in a situation of great hostility and confrontation with then the Soviet Union over the stationing of nuclear missiles within Europe, the so-called Euromissile crisis of the 1980s. And I decided that instead of just panicking about the prospect of nuclear war and nuclear annihilation, which seemed like a real prospect back in the 1980s, that, you know, perhaps I could learn Russian. But I had no idea how to do it. It wasn't certainly offered at my school, Bishop Auckland, then comprehensive school in Bishop Auckland. I think you could study Russian at the time at Durham Johnston, some of the other local schools, but not too many schools in County Durham. And the interesting thing, which ties us back to coal mining again, is the Durham Miners' Association had a small number of bursaries, of grants for the children of miners to basically, were kind of under the rubric of bettering yourself, of kind of, you know, improving your educational opportunities. And I actually got a small bursary of £100, which actually at the time seemed enormous, it has to be said, to go to study Russian for a summer course at the University of East Anglia. And I remember going on the bus with my dad and my sister up to Redhills, the Pitman's Parliament, which is just, you know, down on the other side near the railway bridges. And there's going to be an event here at Durham Cathedral later on about the reopening of Redhills, the Pitman's Parliament. And going into a little office and a man looking at my father's record for working down the mines, confirming he was indeed a miner, and then handing me £100 in an envelope and then telling me to basically spend it wisely and come back and tell them, you know, what I'd done with it. And this was also kind of linked into the history of the Durham miners having connections with miners from around the world, because this is around the time of the Durham miners' strike, and some of this money had been donated to the Durham miners from miners' solidarity groups and unions around Europe, including, ironically, from the Soviet Union, from the Donbas region, which the miners of County Durham had links with going back to the 1920s. And of course, the Donbas is the area that is being most fiercely fought over right now between Ukraine and Russia. And that also gave me a sort of a sense in that of kind of responsibility, because that very first money to study Russian, you know, came from the hard-earned dues of Durham miners, because everything was basically funded by this. And education, you know, obviously for them was very important. Most people who went down the mines didn't get an education beyond age 14 or later, you know, 16. There was a lot of focus on miners' reading circles and literacy groups. And if I had the opportunities, my dad said, to, you know, basically to go to university, then I should take it. But unfortunately, that kind of came around to the idea that I would also have to leave the region, because in that time in the 1980s, as the title of the book that Simon referenced, There Is Nothing for You Here, my dad was basically saying the opportunities, you know, to do the things that you would like to do through education at that point in the 1980s were not really here, especially if you go to study Russian. It wasn't an obvious way of getting a job. Obviously, I wasn't on the dean track for the cathedral, as you clearly were from studying Russian, an unusual path to take as well. But, you know, my whole experience has been one in which education has played a really important role. I wouldn't be doing anything that I'm doing today without that expansion of education, those educational opportunities, including through small grants and bursaries, starting off with the Miners' Association.

Well, I think starting with a bit of advice is that, you know, things don't all happen at once. So although it might look, you know, from the two of us sitting here that everything was kind of obvious and laid out and, you know, we were on a kind of a very clear path, that's never really the way. And, you know, it's sometimes a kind of long and unusual path ahead. I mean, if I had been sitting in here in the sixth form and somebody would have said to me that I would have been sitting in a very different setting giving evidence at the impeachment trial of an American president, I would have told them they were off their heads. I mean, I wouldn't have ever imagined, you know, some of the things that I would have ended up doing because, you know, your life takes unusual twists and turns. But they also... the very fact that I started off here, and I remember, you know, coming here on school trips and sitting, you know, similar to people here today listening to things, the very fact that I could do what I have done is basically a testament to education and to basically taking advantage of any opportunity that comes your way. I would just say be very open to any potential opportunity. Talk to your teachers, you know, get to know all of your classmates. Some of my opportunities in life have come from friends at school telling me about things or, you know, my teachers telling me about an opportunity to study abroad. County Durham has had some really wonderful exchanges. I went, for example, to Tübingen in Germany when I was 15 through a Durham County Council exchange, also to France. I joined a youth choir. My singing was a little bit better than the other thing that I joined, which was a youth orchestra playing the violin. Nobody would want to hear me play the violin. Even myself did not enjoy listening to me playing the violin. Yes, exactly. Please do not ask me. But what it did was open doors because I made connections with people, even in, you know, those kind of ways that, you know, I didn't expect to. So I would just say you can do anything you want to do, and, you know, sometimes something that doesn't look like an obvious opportunity will open a door to something else. It's, you know, kind of like a road with many crossroads, and always ask for help along the way because I have not done everything on my own at all. Going back to the money that I was given from the Durham Miners' Association, to teachers helping me, to other people giving me advice along the way, every little bit of that has made a difference.

Well, it's interesting because beyond the obvious of these being the two superpowers of the time, the nuclear superpowers, and, you know, I was obviously attracted to studying Russian because of the confrontation, and then felt that after I had been in... I had a scholarship to the Soviet Union in 1987, 1988, and I was there for the first major summit in Moscow between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. I mean, talk about a historic time to be there. But I realized I knew nothing about the United States apart from, you know, what I'd seen on the television, which was mostly, you know, kind of Western... Dynasty, exactly, or Dallas and all these kind of, you know, sitcoms and things from the 1980s, which give you a very skewed impression. And I knew very little about the way that US politics worked, how the culture was. I mean, not actually that much, really, to be honest, about US history either. And I thought that if I'd learned so much, I would have started to learn so much about Russia, then I should, you know, start to do the same about the United States. So I started again, getting back to this theme of opportunity and looking for possibilities to study. I tried to see if there were some scholarships to study in the United States and found out that there were, again, got assistance with how to go about applying to that. And, you know, I was kind of expecting to be immediately immersed into this kind of big, you know, politics, particularly in the wake of what I'd seen in Moscow in '87, '88. What I was struck by in both places was how surprisingly similar they were to the Northeast at the time, really, but in very different ways. So when I first went to Moscow, it was the first city I'd ever lived in, and it felt a little bit like a pit village in County Durham. And what I'll say about this, because all the shops were boarded up or basically had nothing in them. Now, here it was because we had no money, so there was no, you know, demand. And in Russia, there was no supply because of central planning. And, you know, kind of, you'd basically go into a shop looking for a pair of shoes and there'd be nothing, or there'd be 10 pairs all in the same size. I looked out once because I needed to buy a pair of boots. I managed to ruin the boots I'd taken with me, and I went into a Hungarian shop that was near the hall of residence I was staying in, and there were 100 pairs of size 10 boots. That's my size, but it was a bit of a problem if you had size 6 or size 7, you wouldn't be able to wear them. I did not buy all 100 pairs, but I thought, wow, amazing, but not great for other people. And I was really struck then by, obviously, there was something wrong with the Soviet economy. It was pretty obvious. And I started to see all of these parallels with the Northeast, thinking these big industrial powers that became the superpowers after World War II and during the Cold War, something was off. And I wanted to try to understand what that was. And when I got to the United States, I got a scholarship to Harvard University. Harvard University was obviously amazing, and, you know, I... once I got, however, beyond the walls of Harvard Yard, I was struck by how much the surrounding area of Boston had declined. This was a place that was basically working-class, blue-collar, built up on the back of car manufacturers, brickworks, but like, you know, my dad worked in the brickworks once, meatpacking plants, and all of them, those big factories and industrial enterprise were also closing. There was a sweet factory that was kind of closing as well. And the only drivers of change in the Boston area were the big universities like Harvard and MIT and Boston University. I mean, obviously, if all of you go to visit that area now, you'll see somewhere that's been transformed on the basis of those universities spurring innovation, but like in Durham and other universities are trying to do here. But it was a period of decline there as well in the 1980s, and I was struck by there was something similar happening everywhere else, and we're still living out the consequences of it, including in this election today.

Well, I think as you're sort of suggesting with the way that you framed that question, what we see today with Vladimir Putin as a very authoritarian leader in Russia is a direct product of the sentiments of loss in that period. I think, you know, if you look around the development of authoritarianism in many countries, Eastern Europe and, you know, elsewhere around the world, if we think back to the 1920s and 1930s, you know, in Europe, the period that gave us the rise of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and also in the Soviet Union itself after the Bolshevik Revolution, they're always rooted in economic grievances and then the kind of feeling that people had lost their identity and lost their futures. And they might look for a political ideology or a political party back in the 20s and 30s, or for a strongman leader. And in the case of Russia, the political culture, for anybody who is studying Russian history here, always reverts towards a kind of a pyramid of power with at the top being previously the Russian Tsar, the Russian monarch, or the head of the Communist Party. And after a period in the 1990s of, as you rightly described, a kind of chaos with fairly weak leadership at the top from Boris Yeltsin, who was much more kind of inclined to sort of let the politics open up and let the kind of country go where it would at the time, you get then a real desire for the end to the chaos. And Vladimir Putin takes advantage of that. He is hired, or he's not really hired, is he? But he's kind of selected by Boris Yeltsin as his successor, as Boris Yeltsin sort of did hire him, but is kind of thinking of him being somebody who would protect Yeltsin and his family from any kind of political backlash, because that's another theme in Russian politics of the previous kind of people have been kicked out and, you know, often don't meet a very happy fate, and also thinking that he'd be a pair of steady hands at the helm of the state. But Putin had come out of the secret services, out of the KGB, and his inclination was to have a very heavy rather than a steady hand on the helm of the state. And I'm not sure that Yeltsin really anticipated that Putin would turn the clock back. But Putin was also enabled by the fact that people were so unhappy with the state of affairs in the 1990s when he started to promise that essentially he would make Russia great again. Basically, there was a kind of rather, yes, exactly. Well, he did, you know, kind of essentially call that phase back in the time. There was essentially a lot of willingness to, you know, basically let him have the reins of power at the center as long as people were left to get on with their own lives. And I would say that they were largely left to get on with their own lives. In fact, many Russians, I would say, were living their best lives in many respects in the 2000s as the Russian economy picked up. But then, of course, things changed rather dramatically when Putin decides to try to, to some degree, put back the Russian Empire, turn the kind of clock back, you know, not just to the 20th century, but earlier times, and become, you know, somewhat obsessed by gathering back in lost territories like Ukraine. And so now Russian population are being repressed, and, you know, they're also being sent to fight in a really horrific war in Ukraine.

Yes, I think that's actually a very important thing to bear in mind as we look at what may happen today in the elections. I talked about, you know, what just happened in Russia where people felt aggrieved and wanted to have, you know, some stability and, you know, kind of an end to chaos. And there's a very similar sentiment in the United States today. So if Donald Trump is actually reelected, it won't be just because, you know, people basically want to support someone like Trump, but because it's also kind of an outgrowth of the continuation of this sense of grievance and of lost opportunity or expectations being dashed, going back to probably, you know, the financial crisis and recession of 2008, 2009, you know, seeing then what happened during COVID and the pandemic, and then the attempts under the Biden administration to, you know, revitalize and reignite the growth in the US economy by pumping in a lot of assistance in that period during the end of COVID and then in the wake of COVID, which unfortunately fueled inflation. So just like many people here get a little bit of a shock when you go to the supermarket and see, you know, where the prices are in the United States, obviously inflation fueled a lot of increase in the prices in the supermarkets, in the grocery stores. And of course, the awful thing about inflation is once prices go up, they don't come back down again. That might happen with petrol prices in the United States, but it never happens with anything else. And so people's expectations that if inflation has ended means that things are going to get cheaper, that's never going to happen. And although people's wages actually might have increased in the United States, people don't feel better off. And then there's kind of all the kinds of losses of identity that all of us can appreciate here if we think back, you know, to the kind of history of the coal miners and those people. Think of the golden ages of the industrial workers in the United States where people didn't need college degrees to get ahead. You could get a great job in the steelworks or in a coal mine or in manufacturing. And now the new technological changes suggest that people need to have at least a bachelor's degree or certainly, you know, some kind of advanced education. And those jobs aren't there. And look, and I'll also be frank, that there is a real feeling that women in particular have got ahead much more than men. And you're actually seeing in the United States right now the consequences of social mobility that have happened for women but not for men in the period since the 1980s. And there's a huge gender gap appearing in this election. So if Kamala Harris gets elected, it'll be to a large part because women and young women in America and older women are all basically voting in opposition to not just the misogynistic language that Trump has, but to this kind of idea of turning back the clock to a period where their social mobility was constrained because of, you know, societal norms and, you know, the way that the economy was structured. I have to say, when I think about that in the Russian context, I spent six months last year in Germany, in the eastern part of Germany, in Berlin, looking at what had happened in Germany in the 1990s and the transition there. And from my own experiences here, that I do actually think that women have benefited more from the changes since the 1980s than men might have done. You know, so I think about my father because there was no expectation, certainly on my part, and I mean, Kathy, probably nobody expected we'd go down a coal mine, and the coal mines had closed. And, you know, women, you know, kind of back in the 60s and 70s, you might get a chance to be a school teacher or a nurse. My mom ended up being a nurse and midwife, but there was an expectation that, you know, you wouldn't be going, you're not following your father and your father's footsteps. And once education was there as an opportunity, you might have opportunities to do different things. And if you look at college campuses in the United States now, they're predominantly female. The majority of students are women, young women. And, you know, maybe for some of the younger, you know, men here, they might, you know, kind of also start thinking, well, you know, my sister or my friends or, you know, although, you know, the women in, you know, my family seem to be getting ahead now. That's not the case in the Northeast quite so much, but certainly is in some of these other settings. So social mobility is perceived now in the US as being somewhat gender skewed, and that's having actually some implications.

In East Germany, I interviewed a German professor who's one of the few former East Germans who's a very senior professor at one of the universities, and he said that East German women did better on two markets than East German men: one, the actual job market, and the other, the marriage market. Because East German women would show up somewhere else in West Germany and have no problem finding a date or a husband, and East German men would show up and people would be wincing slightly. So there was actually a lot of discrimination because East German men were perceived to have been, you know, the workers and not to be particularly, you know, well-educated. And there's a perception that's going on. It's an awkward thing to talk about, but it's actually showing up in all the polling and showing up in a lot of the research in the United States. It's something that's going to have to be tackled. A colleague of mine from Brookings, Richard Reeves, who's also British, has actually set up a whole think tank thinking about boys and men and why social mobility for, you know, boys and men in the US since the 1980s has really not taken off. And I think it's something that we can all relate to, you know, here as well, particularly in the Northeast of England, where traditional jobs have disappeared, and it's not really kind of clear about whether the education system is preparing everybody, no matter, you know, who you are, for the new economy.

Well, that's very complicated in the United States because there's been so much demographic change. And obviously, you know, if we're sitting here in the Northeast, it's very different when you go to London, you know, to see how diverse, you know, London is. London, I think, is the most diverse city, you know, not just in Europe, but I think, you know, internationally at this particular point, which is not a hallmark of the rest of the United Kingdom. And in the United States, you know, we tend to think of this in, I think, fairly stereotypical ways, but the United States demographic profile is changing very rapidly. And when I first got to the United States in the 1980s, you know, I read something about the Civil Rights Movement. We'd all obviously knew about Martin Luther King and the march on Selma and the busing and all the kind of efforts that, you know, people had undertaken to get equal rights for African Americans. But already in the 1980s, the society was changing. You hadn't got the full participation of African Americans in the economy. The legacy of slavery was, you know, still very evident, but you're also getting through immigration even further changes in the US system. And the US is now at a kind of tipping point where the white population, and I use this kind of very loosely because, you know, the kind of the United States census kind of really kind of lumps people from all kinds of different backgrounds together under the kind of rubric of white or non-Hispanic white, which, you know, would be a bit alienating for a lot of people from Europe or, you know, here from, you know, Great Britain as well, because there's no distinguishing, you know, made between, you know, frankly, Arabs, for example, or, you know, Jewish citizens, or French or Italian or, you know, Irish, you know, for example, all in that kind of category is sort of a lumping, you know, together of different categories. But it's also that that white category is now basically headed towards being no longer the majority and not even perhaps the plurality by 2050. The United States will be much more diverse kind of across the board than it's ever, you know, kind of been before. And you can see basically tensions arising out of that because, you know, kind of still in relative terms, particularly, you know, based back on the African American, you know, the black community with the legacy of slavery in the United States, they've never, you know, kind of caught up with, you know, the kind of average, you know, white American. But the white American category includes people like Elon Musk, who's about to be a trillionaire. And if you kind of put him in as the kind of average and all the kind of, you know, billionaires, you'd kind of skew, you know, the kind of picture for white Americans, many of whom are, you know, in absolute poverty as well. Now you're getting a kind of within that the sort of perceptions of tension that some people are getting advantages based on a kind of, you know, definition of race in, for some people, quite a rather abstract way. And, you know, as a result, getting, you know, this is kind of part of the backlash you've seen in the United States has come out during this campaign in terms of access to education and everything else that actually is a bit of a stretch, in fact, because there is, you know, so much of a problem now in social mobility, writ large, in the United States. The United States is a bit like the United Kingdom now, less mobile socially and geographically than it was back in the immediate aftermath of World War II, because the kind of grants and bursaries that people like me would have gotten to go to study, for example, have been reduced. There's Pell Grants in the United States, which are quite similar to the kind of grants that you get for being, you know, underprivileged here in the United Kingdom. There was the GI Bill, which was put into place after World War II for people who served in the military to give them education. But now, you know, for everybody in the United States, just like here, people have to take out loans for their education. And also since the economic collapse and financial crisis, people and the collapse of the housing market, people just cannot afford to move in search of work. So you're actually seeing people being less geographically mobile because the whole thing that you saw previously was people would move around and less socially and economically mobile. And it's not just, you know, defined by race, but that's kind of creating senses of tensions and perception that, you know, based on these demographic changes, that some groups are doing really better than others. And in fact, you'll find in this election that Trump is getting basically more votes than people would have anticipated from disaffected people who feel that their economic opportunities have been stifled by all of these changes from, you know, groups that people wouldn't expect. It's not all white supremacists or racists who are voting for Trump, but people who feel otherwise disaffected from Hispanic groups, from African Americans, you know, and others who don't really kind of feel that they should be categorized in this way. It's actually a very complicated situation in the US now.

Yeah, it's actually a really interesting question because, you know, we see a lot of polarization or fragmentation in many other countries, but it doesn't always take the same partisan form. Because you can see here in the UK, in Germany, in France, you know, many other countries, that there's been a lot of disaffection with mainstream parties. So even though the Labour Party looked like it got a landslide in the most recent election, when you look at that, that's actually not really the case at all. That's what it looks like because we've got a first-past-the-post system, but you actually see a lot more variation and a lot more nuance, let's say complexity, behind that seeming landslide for the Labour Party. Now, in the United States, efforts to create third parties have always failed because the two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, tend to be these big umbrella parties that actually have all kinds of different factionalism within them. And so, you know, you have, you know, traditionally for the Democrats, a kind of left which is not very far left from a European sense, to a kind of center that almost might be seen as a kind of center-right, exactly. And then traditionally the Republicans have been sort of center-right and then not that far right, but with the advent of Donald Trump, they've gone way to the right, to the kind of populist right that actually almost kind of comes back to a kind of radical left in a kind of European context as well. They kind of call it the horseshoe effect, where left and right kind of meet together in a kind of populist context here. And that's also a sign of disaffection with these political parties. But the other thing about the United States, and there's a great course that one of the professors here at Durham has been teaching on the 2024 election, I don't know if he's put this online, David Anderson. So, I mean, if he's got it online, people should, you know, basically check this out, which talks through the vagaries and complexities of the American political system, is that the president almost stands above these political parties. There isn't an actual leadership of the political parties. There's not kind of card-carrying members of the Democratic and Republican Party. Any person within the US can just sort of register when they register to vote as either a Republican or a Democrat or an independent. I obviously registered as an independent, which is actually really kind of one of the larger groups. It's kind of a third, a third. And anybody can run as the representative presidential candidate of one of those parties. In fact, Donald Trump was once a Democrat, and, you know, you have Bernie Sanders who ran in 2016, who was a self-described socialist and as an independent, but, you know, also ran as one of the Democratic candidates. And for a period in 2016, there was so much disaffection with both parties that really the nomination and then the election of Donald Trump could be seen as something of a protest vote. Trump himself said it was kind of like Brexit here in, you know, the UK, which is people were aggrieved about the state of affairs, and when they were given an opportunity to vote for or against, you know, basically staying in the EU, that became an outlet for protests. And Trump basically picked up that protest vote, not across the board, of course, because he only won by a narrow margin in the Electoral College, which is another part of the complexity of the US system, very much a vagary. So the 2016 election was decided by just a couple of hundred thousand people in a few states in the United States, and that could happen again, frankly, today. But over the time since Trump was kind of elected as a bit of a shock candidate, that partisan divisions has reemerged again. The Republican Party has been taken hostage by the Make America Great Again faction around Trump. The kind of conventional Republicans have basically been kicked out of the party with nowhere else to go because there isn't a third-party proposition. You see many of them now actually campaigning for Kamala Harris because they don't know where else, you know, to kind of like basically go. They can't really set up a third party. They're kind of hoping that voters will kick out Donald Trump so they can try to regain the Republican Party again. And the Democrats have themselves been all kind of caught up in kind of fights and arguments and political disputes about whether they should tilt to the left or to the right or to the center. And, you know, Kamala Harris has been playing a very cautious and careful, you know, role through this campaign, trying to kind of find where the electorate and where the Democratic Party should be going. So if this were a parliamentary system, it would be actually, you know, kind of very difficult to judge the outcome. It would probably be like a coalition kind of government, like the kind we saw in Germany or that we've seen in other places. But because it's a presidential system and it's a bit like the first-past-the-post with the Electoral College, a winner takes all, you could end up with a kind of an extreme outcome that does not reflect at all where the politics are in the United States. Frankly, the politics in the United States are not that different from politics here in Germany, in France. They're kind of all over the place, and most people are not really sure, you know, where they think the country is heading. They're not that very pleased about it, but there's still that very strong partisan identification. A lot of people will vote for Trump because he's the nominated leader of the Republican Party. That party's identification has become more extreme over the last couple of years, in part because of the influence that Donald Trump has had in sort of capturing the Republican Party, and then in response to a lot of the things that he's actually done.

Well, it's easy for Trump. I think all of us could do that. You know, I think we've all seen him, you know, in action, and this is, you know, basically a man who thinks only about himself, and everything that he's doing is really about, you know, kind of his own interests. I mean, he wants to be president because he thinks he's the most amazing person on the planet. He talks about this all the time. So I think, again, this is, and he also is very worried about criminal cases against him, and, you know, kind of what might actually happen if he isn't in the presidency and can't pardon himself for all of his many transgressions. It's actually harder to do that kind of sketch, I would say, for Kamala Harris. I think, you know, nobody, even perhaps Kamala Harris herself, is having a hard time figuring out how she'd be basically presenting herself moving forward because of this complexity of the...

political system, and she herself obviously has a very unusual and interesting background. Getting back to this, you know, demographic change in the United States, she epitomizes it. Her mother is South Asian, from India, from the Indian subcontinent. Her father is from Jamaica. Both of her parents are immigrants who came for education, you know, for educational opportunity to the United States. She went to Howard University, a historical black college, which was at the forefront of the civil rights movement back in the 1960s. She's exactly my age, so she's kind of a product of that, you know, kind of period of change. She joined a black sorority, so she was very active in kind of campus politics, obviously very focused on women's issues, again another example of, you know, women getting ahead in that particular period. She studies law, and again, very different from Trump, couldn't be more different, and then becomes a prosecutor in California, a state that is essentially the size and has the capacity of a country. It would be something like the sixth or seventh largest economy, you know, in the world if California were an independent state. A very specific politics that doesn't, and economic and, you know, kind of industrial and other innovation profile that doesn't fit with the rest of the country at all. And so, you know, she's kind of being pigeonholed as kind of part of a sort of West Coast elite, but, you know, again, her background is very complex, a bit like Barack Obama, who wasn't also kind of a conventional American candidate. She doesn't come out of this legacy of slavery of African-Americans with those kind of divides that you've seen in the United States, and, you know, that it's kind of hard to really pigeonhole her. And as vice president, she wasn't really given an opportunity to express herself because the vice president is kind of a sort of an assistant to the president and doesn't really have a, they kind of give them the various ceremonial things to do that nobody else really wants to do. And so she doesn't really have a, you know, kind of a brief for a portfolio, and she's trying to find her way, you know, through all of this. And she wasn't really given a lot of time to prepare, given, you know, the situation with Biden pulling out almost at the 12th hour. So it's very hard to say, you know, where she would head, but I would just, you know, say that on the surface of everything, she's a lot more decent human being than the alternative. So, you know, let's just say where that heads.

Yeah, the world is, as you've just depicted here, an extraordinarily complex place. And as you were framing the question there, I was kind of looking, you know, down the nave here and thinking that there's the plaque to the Washington family just through the door there, you know, on the left-hand side. And George Washington, obviously from Washington County, Durham, namesake of Washington, D.C., rather than County Durham, and famously the first president of the United States, deep roots here. He very famously gave a farewell address when he decided to give up the presidency, which was remarkable in itself. He could easily have actually decided to stay on as president, and he wanted to make that distinction between the tyranny of, you know, the monarchy that the United States had thrown off through the Revolutionary Wars and the idea of kind of a republic with an elected president who would give up as a kind of a matter of course the reins of power when they were kind of elected out or came to the end of their term. But his farewell address was also warning the United States about foreign entanglements. He was very worried about the young American Republic, you know, getting tied up in the whole kind of intrigues of kind of, you know, monarchical Europe, as you know, back in the 18th century, secret diplomacy and treaties and all kinds of other, as he put it, entanglements that could lead the United States astray and away from kind of principles and distract it. Well, I would think that very sadly, George Washington's warning is very pertinent now because the United States finds itself, as a result of all kinds of very bad choices made, I would say, over the course of this century in particular, but things that have been, you know, set in motion long before, in a very difficult place, which has actually brought the rest of us into a difficult place as well. I mean, I think, you know, by this, you know, if we think about the promise when you and I were, you know, studying Russia, notwithstanding what we've just said about what things were like in Russia in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War, we all thought that we had an opportunity to put international relations on a completely different footing. But then, you know, in the beginning of the 2000s, we had the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the United States made a decision that was somewhat understandable, but actually, if you looked at British history, probably not at all a good idea of intervening in Afghanistan in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden. If any of us, you know, I remember reading a lot of history of Afghanistan when I was in school, and I'd always been struck by the retreat from Kabul, and only one man on a donkey made it out of the, what was it, the 14,000, you know, British service people and families who had been there at the time. It was never going to turn out well. That was certainly, you know, kind of the impression that one would get from just a cursory reading of history. But then far worse than that is the decision by the United States, dragging, you know, the UK into that as well, to basically invade, frankly, Iraq in 2003. And I think that everywhere that we get to now really goes back to that ultimate foreign entanglement, which was based on faulty intelligence, you know, basically kind of, in my view, a very wrongheaded assessment of, you know, what was going on in the Middle East, Iraq at the time. And it was really kind of then that decision that led to, you know, the rise of ISIS and other extremist groups in the Middle East, obviously the collapse of the Iraqi state. The Russians looked at this and thought that the United States was just deciding to willy-nilly intervene here, there. They understood Afghanistan; they've been there and done that as well, not in a particularly great way for them either. I mean, the Soviet Union also went into Afghanistan, had to pull out after 10 years of a debacle there, you know, kind of as well. But they didn't understand Iraq at all. Putin and others around him knew that Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction, and they then believed that the United States had made this decision just in basically interest of toppling a government that they didn't like, and then, you know, basically trying to impose their views upon it. And that then there's a direct, I'm afraid, link from that for Putin thinking, well, if the United States can literally get away with, you know, doing whatever it wants on the international stage, rupturing the UN Charter, etc., you know, why should they have that and not the rest of us? As a line, unfortunately, and everything has been kind of accumulative. There's all kinds of mistakes have been made in international affairs, but it's that entanglement and, you know, kind of bringing, you know, others along to it that really kind of changed the dynamic. I also think that if we look back over, you know, this kind of period at the end of the Cold War, that there still was a rather unhealthy dependence on the part of the UK and Western Europe on US defense, instead of really kind of thinking about how Europe itself would like to engage in thinking about longer-term security. And now we're really going to have to think about this as you look at, you know, what is happening in the United States. There was still a kind of a feeling, well, the United States would be the decisive element; we wouldn't really have to do anything. Intervention in Yugoslavia, the former Yugoslavia, for example, in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars, following along in, you know, kind of Iraq and Afghanistan, just expecting the United States to always hopefully do the right thing, but not then, you know, standing up to kind of think about what Europe itself, you know, wanted to do. And that's been also kind of the lesson from the period since 2016 with Trump in power, that, you know, Europe and Europeans, in fact, it goes back to 10 years ago to the summit in Wales for NATO under Barack Obama after the Russians had annexed the Crimean Peninsula, where it should have been obvious then and been, you know, kind of made obvious that Europeans would have to do more to think about security and defense and how Europe, the UK included, would be, you know, kind of thinking about the future of the region. So those kind of hard decisions were already on the table some time ago. The United States got itself entangled in all kinds of conflicts that have led us to, you know, where we are today in Ukraine, also to the Middle East, frankly, you know, the conflicts, you know, in the Middle East, in Israel and also with Iran, you know, involved. And what I talk about the complexity of the moment when the major country in an international system kind of loses its way, as the United States, you know, clearly has, that's when the system starts to come apart. We see not just people feeling disaffected with the domestic system, but also with the international system. And, you know, there's a great eagerness for the Russians and the Chinese to see the United States out the door, close the door behind them, and, you know, kind of have them gone. But this also kind of means that there is no center of gravity for kind of figuring out how to resolve all of the conflicts that we see that have unfolded from everywhere to Yemen and Sudan, Ethiopia, all the kind of conflicts that are not in the headlines of the way that what's happening in Gaza and Ukraine tend to be. And also we're seeing many of those conflicts bringing in other powers, like we saw in World War I and World War II. In fact, the war in Ukraine has become a proxy war for adversaries of the United States. China is involved in supporting Russia. We're hearing about North Korean troops now kind of amassing, ready to join in the fray, about 8,000, you know, North Korean troops, for example. And Iran is also supporting Russia in the war in Ukraine, as well as Iran, you know, being on the verge of, you know, kind of a conflict with Israel, or Israel being on the verge of a conflict with Iran, you know, depending on your, you know, perspective on this. So everything has really come together. Everything has become entangled in ways that, getting back to George Washington, he feared all that kind of time ago. He was very prescient. He was prescient.