Fiona Hill- 'Geopolitics and resilience in an uncertain world'

Thank you so much, Jose Maria, for such a wonderful introduction. And thank you so much to the Ramón Areces Foundation and the president for having me here today, and thank you to all of you for coming. It's actually a great pleasure to be here for many reasons. I was actually scheduled to give a lecture here for the foundation in Madrid exactly one year ago on Monday, May 13 of 2024, as part of the foundation's ongoing partnership with the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. But the very evening before I planned to fly to Spain, I had a brief stopover in London where I gave a presentation, and I tripped over coming out of the presentation in a dark street on the way back to my hotel and broke both my wrists. So be careful, please, when you leave here tonight. So May 9th, that was the day I fell over, was an auspicious day, although not for me. It was the day of a major solar flare that produced some spectacular auroras over the United Kingdom and the United States, perhaps also here in Spain. And it was also Russia's Victory Day, the parade commemorating the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. And as Jose Maria has said, I've done a lot of work and I've been a frequent critic of Vladimir Putin and his policies and actions. And I'm sure that that combined with the power of the magnetic storms meant that the stars aligned against me. Perhaps it was actually just jet lag. But in any case, I spent hours in the emergency room. I didn't see the northern lights, but Ramón and the president and everyone else was on my side because they medevacked me back from London despite the fact that I didn't make it to Madrid after I got out of hospital. So I'm eternally grateful. So as you now know, Ramón Areces is an institution that you can depend on. So here I am, a year later, trying to say thank you in person and to give the lecture that I would have given a year ago, though it's actually changed somewhat now. One year ago, we were already in a very challenging time, and let's just say that now, a year later, it's even more challenging than it was before. The world's more complex, I would say, and more unpredictable as a direct result of developments in the United States with the elections in November 2024. And if I'd been speaking here on May 13th of last year, I don't think I could have predicted all the events that would have taken place in the subsequent year. So let's just say my lecture has now been informed by a whole year of really very dramatic events in the United States. But even before last year's US elections, the global political and security order was definitely changing dramatically. We could already see that the balance of powers was changing, the fundamentals of all our national power, be it in Spain or the United States or anywhere else — political, economic, technological, demographic and climate changes. And we'd already entered a period — we've been in it a long time, in fact — of competition over who is shaping the regional and global orders. Now, this is a competition that's also unusual in our long history. It's not just among and between states. It's not just terrorist groups who are now in the field of geopolitical competition, as perhaps we've seen since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, but it's also private actors, including technology titans — and I'm sure you know who I'm talking about there — who are deeply interested in the geopolitical game. So we're in a period, all of us, where multiple actors are seeking to shape the world to further their own interests at all of our expense, and also conflicts around the world, from Europe to the Middle East and Africa, are also taking a really very troubling turn because we now see the reduction in concern for and attention for minimizing civilian casualties. And of course, minimizing civilian casualties was supposed to be the main feature of the international system that we all set up after the horrors of World War II. So this week, of course, we have the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. And in fact, in the UK — I was just in London before I came here — the VE, Victory in Europe Day, celebrations have already begun. They're going to be taking part all of this week. And 80 years ago, we committed ourselves to ensuring that we would never again engage in the brutal mass slaughter of our fellow human beings. And yet here we are. We're doing it again. Moreover, even societies that are not technically at war are constantly under siege and attack. We're personally and collectively subject every single day to the pernicious effects of psychological and so-called hybrid warfare. We're bombarded by the deliberate destructive power of weaponized disinformation and broadly propagated conspiracy theories. And what's notable on that score, on this hybrid warfare level, is that domestic actors have exactly the same interests as foreign adversaries in promoting societal discord. They all hope to exploit the same things to their own advantage. And this relentless propaganda assault over the last decade has fed the loss of popular trust and confidence in our institutions and our system of governance at a time when we all face real existential threats to humanity from climate change, ecosystem collapse and pandemics. So this is a pretty grim background, and I would probably have said some of this in any case last year. But then the election in the United States has brought new challenges, including a dramatic set of ruptures with America's past policy and practices at home and abroad. And together, these developments highlight, I think pretty definitively, the failure of the mechanisms to keep the peace and to deter war that we put in place at the end of World War II, the breakdown of the post-Cold War global order, and now the end of Pax Americana, the US-dominated and led international system that began in 1945.

So the theme of my discussion tonight is resilience, because we're going to need individual fortitude, which is what I needed after breaking my wrist last year, but also societal resilience to navigate our way through what comes next. We don't have an easy time ahead. So the elections in the United States last year and elsewhere internationally were shaped by the rise of populist politics. Populism and the so-called culture wars, which we also see underway right now in the United States in a rather stark form, are both reactions to and products of a world in rapid change, rapid flux. And in Europe, as well as in the United States, I would say that they are also rooted in the past, in the so-called post-industrial economic disruptions of the 1980s. Now, I discussed this phenomena in a book I wrote in 19 — I almost said 1921, but I'm not that old — in 2021, a book called "There's Nothing for You Here." And in this book, I drew upon personal experiences that I'd had growing up in Northeast England in Durham, where Jose Maria talked about the fact I'd become the chancellor of that regional university now. And when I was growing up in County Durham from the 1960s through into the 1980s, it was a period when the coal mines and all of the local industry, including steel and railways and shipbuilding, all of these industries that underpinned the region's economy and society, disappeared. And the reaction to that that I saw there in the United Kingdom, I also saw the same kind of developments and political responses to this unfold in the United States, elsewhere in Europe, and also in Russia, in what was then the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but later in Russia in the 1990s, in a similar time frame. And as I was going through my university studies at Harvard and later my research work at Brookings, I started to see a lot of parallels. So in brief, for the last 50 years, parts of the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States have actually been on divergent paths of development. Indeed, about a third of the populations in both Europe and the United States, often heavily concentrated in specific regions like Northeast England, former East Germany, or the US Midwest, for example, have fallen behind the mainstream. And this includes in incomes, life outcomes, educational attainment, and life expectancy. And in the United States and in the United Kingdom in particular, the new dividing line or marker of inequality in society is whether you have a two- or four-year college degree or no higher education or access to training at all. And this has had severe ramifications for the health of democracies, particularly in the UK and the United States, but I think elsewhere in Europe. It's somewhat different in Spain, but you can see it very clearly in other countries as well. So we're reaping in the politics of the moment, this populist politics, the fruits of what we sowed half a century ago, because populations who feel left behind economically also feel left out politically. They're simultaneously, in their view, excluded from economic opportunities and full civic participation. And as we've seen in recent elections, also including in local elections in the United Kingdom this week where the Reform Party has actually taken over the council in County Durham, winning basically 65 out of 90 seats, having never won a single seat in those local elections before, we can really see that people who feel that the system is skewed against them are willing to protest, often at the ballot box, not just on the street. They're prepared to shake up politics by supporting anti-establishment movements and also authoritarian politicians, be it in the United States, sometimes here in Spain, certainly in Germany and Italy and France, as well as in many other countries. So almost every country now has a deep socio-political and cultural fissure inside of it based on geographic and economic inequality coming together. In the United Kingdom, it's a north-south divide. In the United States, it's an east-west and also center-periphery or interior-coastal split. You have your own versions of it here in Spain. And all of these divides that are often geographic and economic that have come together exacerbate polarization and also political party or partisan divides over how countries should be governed and who should govern them and for whom should they be governed. These parties and divides promote also anti-establishment and populist isolationist politics that we can see in the United States, and they demand major domestic change and greatly complicate foreign policy and international cooperation.

Demographics is also playing a role here, and again, it may look a little bit different from Spain, but certainly in the United Kingdom and the United States and in Germany and France and other countries, we can really see that the north-south rift within countries is emblematic also of a generational rift between the young and older parts of the population. Many of the societies here in Europe and elsewhere, including in these old industrial heartlands, are aging and increasingly childless. And so with low fertility and birth rates, the future looks very different in these places than it does elsewhere in the world. And if we think about the rest of the world, obviously Spain has very close relationships with many parts of Latin South America and Africa and elsewhere. What in the United States tends to be called the Global South, but obviously it's really the rest of the world. We've still got a population and youth boom, and there obviously the impacts of climate change and economic pressures have a very different outcome from what we might see elsewhere in Europe and the United States. And I think it's also fair to say that globally, youth also feel pitted against the old, and their anger about the lack of opportunities and a future denied or withheld is also having impact on their domestic politics as well as international politics. And I think where we see this most acutely in the United States and in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe is in debates about immigration. And I know Spain has got a very different experience with immigration at the moment. But if you look at the dynamics of immigration globally and especially in the US and in Europe and in the United Kingdom, what do we see? Of course, migrants, immigrants come to our countries for a future, but declining Western populations see all their best times in the past. I mean, they're more backward-looking, not forward-looking. They feel that they've lost identity and they also worry about how they're going to share depleted resources with newcomers and also compete with them, especially in hollowed-out former industrial heartlands with few educational and job prospects, limited affordable housing and diminished prosperity. And this was also a major feature of these local elections in the United Kingdom, by the way, and County Durham, where Reform got the vast majority of the votes, has very little immigration. But it's that perception that somehow people are losing out and they're looking back to the past because they don't really see much prospect and hope for the future. And that's what Reform has really kind of played upon. So in a world with these north-south rifts within countries, not just between the north and the south globally, we've got all kinds of questions that we have to address. Who has privileges? In this respect, privileges are literally access to education, access to jobs and also affordable housing. Who decides what changes in these societies? Who pays for that change? This is all the big debate about climate change, obviously, and how to deal with it. Who benefits from change? Who doesn't? And who can offer anyone else a future? So these are all of the issues that are coming out in all of these elections. So all countries have to find a way to adapt their political and economic structures to address these big changes — demographic, social, economic, and technical. And they're all contending with ways of how to build more responsive governments and resilient societies.

So this is where I want to just talk for a little while in the last part of my presentation about ways in which we can think about moving forward, because working in a think tank like the Brookings Institution and currently serving as the chancellor of Durham University in a left-behind region in the United Kingdom, as well as on the Board of Overseers at Harvard, as Jose Maria also said, I think this actually puts a particular spotlight on the educational sector internationally, not just domestically. Because if you think about how we put people, social and economic issues and the broader environment and all the technical and other issues that we're dealing with first, and how do we bring young people who are increasingly disaffected into the political process — it's obviously through education, because education is an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of institutions of learning and training that should begin in early childhood and frankly go all the way through our lives. And it's a fundamental source of this idea of resilience, because education offers individuals the chance to develop knowledge, learn skills, and forge connections and networks that can help them transform not just themselves but their communities and by extension their countries. Education provides resources to cope with change and it gives people new tools to adapt to new demands and overcome difficulties. If we think about education in this way, we realize it's society's collective investment in the future. We might learn about the past, but it's an investment in the future through education because it's our way of passing on lessons, mistakes that we've made in the past, as well as passing on new ways of thinking, the fruits of our research and our own innovation. And if everyone has access to education in some form — doesn't have to be at university, but through training, vocational training, through learning new skills, for example — it becomes a great social and economic equalizer. So this realization obviously lies at the heart of the Ramón Areces Foundation's investment in education and scientific research since the late 1970s. And I've read a little bit about Ramón Areces himself, and obviously he knew that scientific and technical research as well as education plays a key role in economic and societal development, not just in the creation of knowledge and the reproduction of knowledge. And this sadly seems to have been a point that's got lost in the last decade or so in the United States. It hasn't been forgotten perhaps now as a result of recent developments, but it's only recently that you started to read opinion editorials, articles, and hear in podcasts in the United States, just literally in the last couple of months, about the importance of education, and that came because of a crisis, because we saw the United States government suddenly suspending contracts and grants to major US universities, research universities like Harvard, attacking their charitable status, which is still underway, and disbanding or otherwise assaulting many of the institutions and foundations that have traditionally underpinned the knowledge economy in the United States. I mean, I've been experiencing a lot of this firsthand, and I've been thinking myself, even before all of this happened in the United States, about the role of education in fostering societal resilience during periods of great upheaval for some time. In 2023, I actually spent six months at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, specifically looking at the relationship between industrial decline, regional development, political polarization, and education. I was trying to see if Germany, which obviously always has a very good reputation for being a country that built itself up after World War II also on the basis of education, and whether they had some best practices that could be adapted for other settings. And I was specifically looking at the role of education and university in Germany's policymaking at various junctures. So Germany has heavily invested in education literally for decades, specifically to reduce regional inequality and from the German perspective to foster social cohesion, which also I think is something that's been important here in Spain. And we could call social cohesion a component of resilience because it's kind of the idea of a shared purpose. And that's actually embedded even within the German constitution. And in Germany, public education is explicitly seen also as a driver of economic growth. So if you look at public education in Germany very closely, obviously there are technical and vocational schools as well as universities, and they all function, even including the primary and secondary educational levels, as pipelines for industry at both the national and regional level. Most German universities and a lot of their schools have a heavy focus in their curriculum on applied sciences and engineering. They offer opportunity for students to combine study with placements for work, including through international partnerships. Jose Maria, for example, also taught and studied in Germany. We talked about this before we came in. And universities and training schools have been established in every region of Germany. And I specifically looked at the industrial Ruhr region, for example, because I was interested in seeing if this might translate in the United Kingdom or in the United States. And what was notable was that in the 1960s and 1970s, when investment in coal and steel declined and production of coal and steel declined, investment in education was specifically increased in the Ruhr region. And the German government has all this really interesting national and regional level data, which you don't have to look at because I looked at it for you, which shows the correlation between economic growth and education, including the creation of university alliances and partnerships. And what's also interesting is in Germany you can really see that economic growth and investment in education is directly linked. And in the UK, I also have had a look at that data because, you know, my role as Durham University — universities in the United States are public institutions like they are here in Spain, and you can see the linkage between the economy and the role of universities. So in the northeast of England, in addition to Durham, there are four other universities, and if you look at them together, they collectively support more than 34,000 jobs in the northeast of England, which is significant because this is one of the poorest areas of Britain, and they contribute about 2.2 billion pounds every year to the local economy, which is pretty significant. And higher education overall in the UK represents 768,000 jobs, which is a lot of jobs in the UK economy, and 130 billion every year to the country's economy. So people start to see that universities are economic anchor institutions, not just there to educate students over the longer term. They also see themselves as playing cultural roles. And so what you've seen in Germany and the UK and Britain has also played out obviously in the United States. But the problem in the US right now, just for you to kind of think about, is that until now nobody was actually thinking about the economic and social impact of universities. It was just taken as a given, and no one was actually contemplating the role that the US educational system played because it's so massive and diffuse. You've got literally 6,000 different kinds of universities and colleges and training schools. There are more than 18 million students who are being educated in the US system. That's an enormous number of students. But no one really has collected data on what this actually means for the US economy. It was just taken that this would be a public good. And this means that it's been very hard for US universities to actually prove their value to society. And of course, they're having to do that now because it's not just that the educational sector is in full-blown crisis. It's actually at war with the US government. And that's something I think you've probably realized here in Spain. But living it in the United States gives you a whole different dimension of appreciation for what's happening. Education and research, even life-saving medical research, is no longer seen as a public good in the United States. It's not seen as essential in developing and growing regional and national economies. It's actually seen as a politically contested area now in the culture wars. So the value of higher education that might be taken as a given here, for example, as well as scientific discovery, which is obviously an important part of the work of Ramón Areces and expertise, and the value of this to students, to society and economy, is being questioned by the president, all of the US administration, members of Congress, and even large segments of the general public, particularly those who feel left out of the benefits of economic development — that about 30% of the population that I mentioned. The Department of Education is being disbanded. Books are being banned. Obviously, you've heard about this. Libraries closed, scholarships ended, and specific subjects are being actually targeted for elimination in universities. And critical medical trials, all kinds of things are being suspended that you would never have anticipated before. And of course, in the United States, just like here and elsewhere, universities and college clusters have driven the development and prosperity of the country since the Civil War. In fact, most public universities in the United States were actually set up across the country by Congress between 1862 and 1890 to modernize the higher educational system of the American states, even when the Civil War was going on. And a very strong emphasis was put on applied science, military science, and agriculture and engineering, very similar to the kinds of things that happened here in Spain or in Germany and elsewhere. And in addition to all the classical academic subjects taught at places like Harvard, all the universities were encouraged to move out into this whole support for the modernization of the US economy in this period. And of course, after World War II, the US expanded educational opportunities even further, including for soldiers returning from fighting in Europe through the so-called GI Bill of 1944. So education was always important to the prosperity and the development and growth of the United States. And since the 1980s, universities have also spurred the transformation and turnaround of many of the regions that were left behind with all of the economic shifts of that period, including in the US Northeast in the greater Boston area where I did my graduate studies at Harvard. Industrial and economic decline, which was quite serious in Massachusetts and in the surrounding area, was reversed in the subsequent decades because universities like Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Boston University and many others — there are 35 universities and colleges in Boston alone — invested in education and created new technology and innovation hubs, including in healthcare, that turned the region around. And now all of this is being imperiled by these shifts in the political attitudes and by US government policy. Now I just want to conclude that by pointing out that beyond economic development, education plays a really important role in the expansion and consolidation and maintenance of democracy. And here in Spain, obviously, education and the critical support activities of foundations like Ramón Areces played a very important role in helping the country through the transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy after Franco's death in 1975. Similarly, in Germany, it was important for the rebuilding of Germany after World War II and the maintenance of the new German democracy. And again in Germany, it's very clear from government studies that the German regions with the most robust educational networks have less political polarization and less extremism than regions without. And you could see that in the recent German local elections. The areas where the AfD did the worst were the areas that had the best educational opportunities. And of course, vice versa. The AfD gained the most votes in places with fewer educational opportunities, just as Reform did the same in northeast England where only about 35% of people apply to university, which is, you know, far less than the national average of 41% or 56% in London, for example. And in the United Kingdom, I'd just like to conclude by reinforcing this idea of the importance of education and democracy, because a century ago — I muffed up earlier by saying 1921 with my book instead of 2021 — perhaps because I was thinking that expanding education in the 1920s in the United Kingdom was seen as the antidote to demagoguery and to autocracy and authoritarianism after the devastation of the First World War, because obviously after Russia's Bolshevik Revolution and then, you know, with the rise of fascism here in Germany and in Spain and Germany and Italy in the 1930s, you could really see that the world was changing, a very similar kind of period to what we are in now. And in 1918, right at the end of World War I, the UK had an education act that expanded the availability of public education. It raised the school leaving age and expanded scholarships to grammar schools, and it also initiated plans for more educational innovation over the next decades. And in 1919, the British government did something else which was quite enlightened for the time. And this gets back to some of the things that, you know, people are thinking about right now here in Spain, because in 1919 the British government decided that there should be a permanent national necessity of establishing a system for adult education, and at that point adult was anybody who had left the regular schooling and gone into the workplace. So these would be, you know, quite young people still, but the idea was to have permanent education to keep up with all the democratic and social and industrial challenges of the post-World War I period. And a report from the government at the time specifically concluded that British people should be able to think for themselves and make informed judgments, and that the education system should be specifically directed towards individual agency and critical thinking in troubled times. I mean, that sounds like the kind of thing that we should be thinking about now. This was also the period when the BBC was created in the United Kingdom in the 1920s, and it was also based on the idea of offering equal access to information and to actually avoid the politicization and the weaponization of information that was coming out of the Bolshevik Revolution and then would later come out of authoritarian propagandist states. And the BBC was actually specifically seen as a tool for people to gain useful knowledge. So 100 years ago, the idea of having an educated, well-informed, self-motivated, and resilient population was the heart of thinking about how to respond to war and upheaval and to the challenges of a world that might be dominated by autocrats and by authoritarian governments. Education was at the root of preparing populations to be resilient and to be able to adapt. So in the spirit of learning from the past and given the current geopolitical developments, I think we're going to have to embrace that idea again, which is also, of course, what Ramón Areces and the Center for European Studies at Harvard are thinking about doing together. I just want to conclude by saying that I personally believe that education, research, and knowledge is central to resilience, and there's no better place to enshrine this concept than here at the Ramón Areces Foundation. So, thank you very much for your time, and I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I'm always being very careful not to trip.

No. Well, thank you very much. Um, Jose Maria, I didn't initially set out to write a memoir, to be honest. I work in a policy think tank at the Brookings Institution. I initially set out to write a policy book because I was trying to explain how the US and Russia were starting to look more like each other, which was, you know, something of a surprise even for me as somebody who has been working on the Soviet Union, Russia, you know, for a very long time. I started studying Russian in 1984, and I was becoming more and more worried that the United States was heading down a very similar path in my, you know, in my time there. I wouldn't have thought that, you know, when I first got to the United States in 1989, but certainly my experience in the first Trump administration gave me a lot of pause for thought, and I was wanting to try to explain to myself at first how was it that we got, you know, an authoritarian system in Russia, because in the 1990s, Russia looked like it might be actually on a very different trajectory. You know, if we look back to the 1980s and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of a new Russia under Boris Yeltsin, the creation of political parties, you know, efforts at economic reform, more pluralism in the society. You know, for a while it looked like Russia was heading in a different direction. But what became clear to me in my studies of Russia was that, you know, there was an underlying set of challenges and issues that were going to be very hard to overcome. And a lot of people, a majority of people, felt displaced and that their lives had been upended by the shock therapy of the 1990s and the dramatic changes in the economy, and eventually they came to want to have something that was much more traditional in Russian political culture, a heavy hand from the top, and that you started to see people become more and more supportive of Vladimir Putin irrespective of all of the repression that he carried out. And although, you know, Putin isn't as popular always as he seems, he's certainly more popular than anyone else. And although people are not exactly happy with the war in Ukraine, they still see Putin very much as the symbol of the state and they've accepted this very, you know, top-down vertical of power there. And I started to see in the United States more and more people become angry and dissatisfied at the state of their democracy. Democracy is not delivering, which is exactly the same thing you hear here or you hear in Germany. People feeling that their lives were upended by the rapid change, a lot of grievances, and wanting somebody to be decisive and to be in charge. And people voting for Trump in the 2016 elections because they wanted someone to fix the problems. And that remains the case. People voted for Trump again in, you know, the recent elections because they thought he was more likely the person to take action. And even a hundred days into Trump's presidency, where most of us see chaos and crisis and unpredictability and have no idea where this is going, a majority of Trump's supporters are still very happy with the fact that he's taking action because they feel that their lives were upended, like people in Russia, and that they want somebody to do something about it, and they're very happy that he's doing something about it, even though it might not be exactly working out the way that they want. And I saw the same thing happening in the United Kingdom prior to this in 2016 with Brexit. I mean, I think for most people here, Brexit seems incomprehensible. But for people in the North of England who felt that nothing was ever done for them, 50 years plus of no change whatsoever, the North of England, you know, became impoverished overnight and has remained that way for 50 plus years. Successive governments have done absolutely nothing. And it was easy to blame all of this on the European Union, but it was really a protest vote, basically saying that nothing has been done for me. And the title of the book, "There's Nothing for You Here," was what my father said to me when I was leaving school in 1984, that if I went to university at that time — only 10% of the population went to university — that I, and if I, you know, got an education, there would be nothing for me in my home region, that I should go somewhere else to find a future because all of the, you know, the promise was in the past. And so in trying to sort of think about what I was seeing happening in Russia, in the United Kingdom, and in the United States, I sort of fell back on my own personal experiences because it gave a kind of an insight that I don't think I would have had if I'd just been studying this as an academic. And, you know, basically my father left school at 14 to become a coal miner. He went down the mines in 1947. And, you know, basically he lost his job in the coal mines three or four times, then went to work in a brickworks and a steelworks, all of which were tied to the larger industry of the mines, and he never got retrained. And so, you know, in his 30s, he became a hospital porter because he couldn't find a skilled job because his skills in the coal mines didn't translate into anything else. And that was at the very lowest rung of the employment market. So there was never any chance to get a new skilled job. And all of the people around my father who had been coal miners or working in other nationalized industry... My father was actually quite an optimistic person, and he actually did...

get a job and, you know, basically was happy to have a job. But so many of the people that he had worked with were very resentful. And then the next generations, you know, also didn't have jobs. They didn't — excuse me — they didn't have the skills or the skill sets. The educational system wasn't set up, you know, to help them to get new skills to work in the knowledge economy. And kind of basically people who would have before that worked in mines or steelworks or in shipbuilding end up going to work in Amazon super warehouses, or they go to work in, you know, like manufacturing that eventually disappears as well, or they go to work in call centers, or, you know, become, you know, delivery workers, and, you know, find themselves not in, you know, kind of in a way to be able to move forward. And that's the kind of, you know, vicious circle. So I started to decide that maybe using my personal experience would perhaps illustrate more the kind of problems that we were facing and perhaps more readable than the policy book that I'd set out to actually write about.

So, it's actually a little complicated to talk about the administration per se, because I think there's probably a lot of different views around Trump about Putin and Russia, and some of these you see, you know, when you're seeing some of the reporting in the press and stuff here. But Trump himself has a very personal view of Vladimir Putin. On the one hand, he's the kind of leader that Trump himself would like to be. You've got to, you know, remember, I mean, Trump himself has described himself as a king. And the Russian presidency was actually modeled on, in the 1996 constitution, on a constitutional monarch, but not the kind of constitutional monarch that we have in Spain or the United Kingdom, but a kind of monarch who is, you know, the number one figure within the constitution. So, the only sovereign decider, and that's exactly what Vladimir Putin has turned the Russian presidency into. The parliament is a rubber stamp. The Supreme Court equivalent, the Constitutional Court, just upholds the role of the presidency in Russia, and the judiciary basically applies the laws as the president of Russia decides.

Now, if you look and listen very carefully, President Trump is saying exactly that — that's what he sees the presidency in the United States. In fact, many of those around him have developed this theory of the unified executive, which in the days of George W. Bush was also a theory that was tried and put into practice. But it meant the executive branch, all the people who participated in it, and now it just means the president, and means in this case Donald Trump. And, you know, Trump has this habit now — go and have a look at the White House website and how much that has dramatically changed. He puts all kinds of memes of himself. Recently he put himself as the pope on the White House website, which has caused a lot of backlash, but also not backlash in some circles in the United States. But he also put a picture of himself as a king quite recently, and 'long live the king.' And next year, of course, is the 250th anniversary of US independence from Great Britain and from the king, Mad King George. And Trump is obviously trying to describe himself as King Donald in this next phase. So we've gone full circle in 250 years. But this is one of the reasons why Trump is so fixated on Putin, because Putin's turned the presidency into basically the equivalent of the Russians'.

So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, Trump sees the world in very similar terms to Vladimir Putin, as a world of spheres of influence and a world where might makes right, and where there are only a few, a handful of sovereign powers that really can exert their will on the rest of the world. And you've also noticed that Trump has talked about running the country and running the world at the moment. And he talks about, of course, acquiring Greenland, which he means. He means this, Canada as the 51st state. He means this as well, and obviously Panama and the Panama Canal Zone. And he talks about dividing the world up into spheres of influence, just like Putin has. This has not been the talk of previous US presidents for an extraordinarily long time now. I would say, you know, I always thought that the US was moving in a different direction over the last, you know, 30, 40 years, but Trump wants to bring it back again. So actually his interest in sitting down with Putin is, I think, he wants to reenact in many respects the famous picture from Yalta, where you had Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill, and in this case, you know, Trump is also very interested in adding President Xi and China into the mix as well, and dividing, you know, the kind of world off into these various spheres of influence. He talks about this, you know, quite openly.

And that gets us to, you know, really what he thinks that he is doing in part with his desire to sit down with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. Ukraine is simply something to be divided up in this kind of worldview. But also for Trump, there is another element in this, that he sees Ukraine as an obstacle to be able to reset the relationship with Putin and with Russia. He goes back again to the 1980s, thinking that the United States and the Soviet Union — he thinks of Russia as the Soviet Union, as Putin also does — were on a different trajectory for improving their relationships, and they were going to do all kinds of business deals. Remember, he visited the Soviet Union and Moscow in 1987, at the kind of the height of the Gorbachev period, when the United States and the Soviet Union were in the midst of thinking about expanding their relationships. And at that time, Trump obviously had the desire to build Trump Tower and to have economic and other business deals. He's never changed that mind. But the other element of this was that it was against the backdrop of the major arms control negotiations.

And this is where I think Trump is actually misunderstood, and where I'm a little bit more sympathetic towards his view, based on my experience in the first administration, where I'm quite negative on most of the other things that I saw there. Trump, I think, was deeply affected, as I personally was, and maybe many of you here were, by the Euromissile crisis of the 1980s. So I decided to study Russian in 1984 when I was, you know, a young person in Northern England, because of the thought that perhaps we might be obliterated in a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. 1984 was right at the midst of the kind of the peak, or 1983, 1984, of the Euromissile war scare, the peak of the Cold War. And you may remember that we had that standoff from 1977 to 1987 over the stationing of new categories of strategic and intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe. And, you know, that was kind of Europe's version of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which must have affected Trump as a young person, and he would have been 10 or 12 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so, you know, that was the period where there was a hope that, in fact, we would not just have arms reduction, but maybe arms control, but maybe even get rid of nuclear weapons. And remember, Gorbachev and Reagan, on the way to signing the INF Treaty, which they did in 1987, just before I went there actually as a student and before Trump visited, there was a whole idea that during their summits in Reykjavik or Geneva and Helsinki and elsewhere, they might even talk about getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether. And Trump is actually fixated with that period, and he wants to sit down with Putin and actually negotiate arms control deals. And when he was with Zelensky, President Zelensky of Ukraine, in the Oval Office during that dreadful episode of the meeting together, he told Zelensky that Zelensky was gambling with World War III. And what he really meant was, you're getting in the way of me being able to sit down with Putin and talk about nuclear weapons. It's also part of why he wants to sit down with Iran and also with North Korea. There's a pattern there. Now he seems to admit it that India and Pakistan might be, you know, kind of on the verge of a nuclear exchange, and he doesn't really think about France or the UK as nuclear powers. He does think about China, and ultimately, I think he also wants to make a deal with China on nuclear weapons, in which he would be quite willing to probably give up Taiwan, because as a real estate guy, he thinks it's all about territory or about property, and, you know, kind of that isn't such a big issue. But, you know, for him, the greatest catastrophe is the prospect of a nuclear exchange. He said that openly. I heard him say it many times in meetings when people tried to tell him it's climate change. He would always say, which was the idea of the 1980s, of course, that the biggest, most catastrophic climate change would be a nuclear winter as a result of nuclear Armageddon. So he's actually very focused and very much shaped on all of those developments of the 1980s. So what he wants is a ceasefire. He wants to put Ukraine to one side, and he wants to move on with his reset of relations with Putin, who personally he's very focused on and fixated on having a good relationship with. So it's not really about Ukraine at all, and I don't think he really cares about what happens to Ukraine over the longer term, which of course is something of great concern to Europe.