Podcast: How the US survives deep divisions: Fiona Hill and the post-Jan 6 fight for American democracy

TRANSCRIPT: How the US survives deep divisions: Fiona Hill and the post-Jan 6 fight for American democracy

Fiona Hill:

Can we overcome these massive divisions? Can we find a common purpose? Can we put America back into the picture here and all of us as American citizens?

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, one year after the January 6th Capitol Insurrection, we are taking stock of the state of American democracy. What, as a nation, have we learned since those acts of violence and seditions shocked the world, and how likely are they to be repeated?

I'm joined by Fiona Hill. She served as Senior National Security Advisor under President Trump before famously testifying against him in his first impeachment trial. You remember that one. If anyone knows how hard it can be to stand up for democracy in the United States these days, it's her. Let's get to it.

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GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. How can sports change the world for the better? On The Long Game, a co-production of Foreign Policy and Doha Debates, hear stories of courage and conviction, both on and off the field, directly from athletes themselves. Ibtihaj Muhammad, Olympic medalist and global change agent, hosts The Long Game. Hear new episodes every week on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ian Bremmer:

Fiona Hill, thank you so much for joining us on GZERO World.

Fiona Hill:

Great to be here with you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

So I'm going to start with January 6th, whether or not you feel a little bit more optimistic or not a year after those horrible events in terms of the United States and the future of our democracy.

Fiona Hill:

Well, actually, no, I don't really feel that much better because we're still grappling with the ongoing consequences of that particular event. And in many respects as well, it was just an episode in an ongoing struggle that we're in the midst of right now, on the societal political level, about the future of the country. And it was a manifestation, January 6, 2021, of the deep divisions, the partisan infighting, the polarization within our society.

The fact that we could have a group of our citizens basically storm a building that is supposed to be a unifying symbol, a symbol of freedom, of representational democracy, not of repression, this isn't like the Storming of the Bastille and the idea of a kind of repressive fortress that had to be basically taken down for people to win their rights. This was the here and now of American politics and a group of people feeling that they had no recourse other than to engage in acts of violence beating up Capitol police, going after members of Congress who are supposed to be their representatives, and potentially even getting their hands on the Vice President and talking about hanging him.

I mean, who would've thought that the United States would end up in that kind of situation? And the fact that we haven't really fully processed it, that we haven't kind of come up with a common narrative of what happened there. We've had the dismissal of this as just an episode one day in January, even by Mike Pence, who would've been the target of the mob himself. I mean, this kind of shows the problems that the United States is facing.

So no, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about where we are, but I do think as we move on with this, we unpack it, the real necessity is to figure out where we are going as a polity. Can we overcome these massive divisions? Can we find a common purpose? Can we put America back into the picture here, and all of us as American citizens who are not divided up into these camps, and certainly don't feel that we have to get to the streets and commit acts of violence to be able to find our own place in the world and in the country? I mean, we've got a long way to go still.

Ian Bremmer:

When January 6th happened, I found myself thinking back to a lot of the movements outside the United States that Americans have historically supported: when the Wall came down in 1989, with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The people themselves that were storming the Capitol actually would've thought of themselves in that environment as not so different in trying to uphold their own democracy and keep the elections sacrosanct. Do you think there's any reasonable fairness in that perspective?

Fiona Hill:

Well, look, clearly those people did, and many of those people did think that, as you've laid out like that, and they've been lied to. And I would hope that, as a result of the process and all the discussions and the national debate about this afterwards, that many of them have realized, I mean, it's not just those who found themselves prosecuted and facing jail terms, but others who are involved in it would realize that they've been lied to.

And look, this is the United States. I'd sue people if I were them basically for motivating them under false pretenses. So not just a kind of question of civil suits against them by people who were hurt at their hands, like the Capitol Police, but if I were them, I would be suing the leaders that lied to them because they were basically incited to violence and encouraged to storm the Capitol Building under entirely false pretenses. And look, I'm not a litigious person. In another setting, I wouldn't advise that, but this is the United States and the President and many other the people have decided with frivolous lawsuits, and this wouldn't be frivolous.

Ian Bremmer:

And the idea that the election is stolen is something that has not only been perpetuated by the former president, but also is something that is still believed very much by a strong majority of Republican voters and by Trump supporters across the country.

Fiona Hill:

Yeah. Well, it's believed because the people who are telling the lies are people ostensibly with a great deal of credibility drawn from their positions in society.

And this gets back to my point about lawsuits. We find ourselves in this situation that a political system doesn't give us an awful lot of recourse. Our free speech, the Amendments to the Constitution, the upholding of free speech within our society, which is a very important element of American freedoms, and the whole basis of our politics and society, actually gets us in a bind here because we are being told by the people who are telling lies that this is actually free speech.

So this is why I'm saying that they actually, in some respects, the only recourse is to sue. President Trump and the people around him should be apologizing to the people who followed them or followed their direction or felt that they were following their direction on January 6th. Perhaps they should be paying for all of their legal fees and the harms that they have encountered as a result of finding themselves in considerable legal problems.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you worked for this Administration, and so to some degree, you worked for this President, you worked for this man. Given how badly it all went, both for you personally and the attacks that you've had to face, and also in terms of what happened to the country up to, and in some ways, culminating in the events of January 6th, does that make you feel conflicted, and if so, how, about the time that you spent personally in the White House?

Fiona Hill:

I don't have any problem whatsoever with what I did and the decision that I made in going into the White House or the Administration's National Security Council back in 2017. I did this purely on the basis of trying to do something on national security as a result of the Russian interference in the election in 2016. And behind the scenes, that's what I've focused my attention on. I didn't play political games with anyone. I was in charge of Europe and Russia on the National Security Council, and I have complete confidence that at no time did I subvert my own principles.

Now, in terms of my personal views about Trump and about serving the man himself, plenty of people have said that to me, "How could you?" Or, "Are you now not being disloyal?" I took an oath to the country. First of all, I took an oath of citizenship. I'm a naturalized US citizen, so I've taken an oath twice, and I also served the country previously as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council.

Ian Bremmer:

I remember well. Absolutely.

Fiona Hill:

So unlike people who are born here, I've actually taken an oath to serve the country and to be a good citizen and to step up and to give something back. And again, I did that the second time when I went into there, I went in there with eyes wide open, I'd been properly warned, and I was attentive to what was going on there. And I made sure at all points that I reported up my chain of command to others about what was going on, and that I either tackled this head on, and as many people know, when I was asked to step up as a fact witness in the first impeachment trial, and I was subpoenaed to do so, I did so, and I told the truth. And I have put up with an awful lot of attacks, defamation against me and my character, and that's fine because that comes with the territory unfortunately, it seems these days, of public service and of being in the national spotlight.

And in the worlds of George Orwell, who've I've quoted before, "At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." And I mean, that's kind of basically the business that I and you and others are into and should be into, which is telling the truth. And if people don't like the truth and want to attack you, that's perfectly fine.

But as I said, within the confines of the job that I was doing, I always told the truth. I was always upfront and I did give myself, in the knowledge that this was going to be a very difficult assignment, a time limit. So I left in the summer, in July of 2019. I left one week before the fateful phone call between President Trump and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine.

Ian Bremmer:

Ukraine, yeah.

Fiona Hill:

And it was already obvious by that point that I was already straying into that territory that I had been worried about of a time when I would have to make a really difficult decision about how to continue, given the direction that the presidency was going in. But I thought it was extraordinarily important, and you've worked in this sphere as well, for you as national security, to step up when something was happening. The country was under attack from the outside, there was assault and intervention in our democracy, and we needed all hands on deck to do something, and what an incredible number of people, both political appointees and non-partisan experts are all trying to do something behind the scenes.

So I've no regret about that whatsoever. But of course, I have a lot of conflicted feelings since then about what is happening and what my own role should be. And I've chosen to speak out, not just by writing a book that layers out some of my experiences within the government, but to continue to speak out about these issues because as you refer to that platform, I never expected to be in that position. But I think it's very important for people to stand up there, be counted and speak out, and basically tell people how things are. And I have a unique experience of having been in there and seen it and being able to then speak with authenticity and firsthand experience of what I saw.

Ian Bremmer:

So I want to move from that sort of directly to the Russia question because of course, part of the challenge, the disinformation, if you will, in some ways began with intervention by Russia into the 2016 election, which the Obama Administration at the time did not respond effectively to, knew it what was going on, but didn't do very much at all, very late. And so clearly, the Putin Administration understood, and Putin himself understood he had a level of impunity. Trump comes in and he wants to be buddy-buddy with the Russian President, doesn't want to criticize him at all, says, "Don't worry, I got to be mean to you in front of the cameras, but everything is just fine."

Given all of that, how do we deal with a Russian President who clearly feels a level of impunity, clearly feels emboldened in terms of the actions that he has been able to take, both in his neighborhood, both in his own country, and even involving the United States of America?

Fiona Hill:

Well look, part of it, and part of the reason why he's been so successful at this and why there is that sort of sense of impunity because in fact, behind the scenes, there were some punishments that were kind of metered out as a result of those actions, but it gets to the heart of our divisions, polarization and partisan infighting because there's no us, no we, there's no United States in terms of the foreign policy at this particular juncture.

And in 2016, the Obama Administration hesitated because it was in the middle of an election season, an election campaign, and they didn't want to take an act that would look like they were getting involved in the electoral campaign because of course, President Obama had finished up his two terms. And this is why the Russians intervened at that point because it was a very fertile propitious moment for intervention.

We were uniquely divided, more so than we'd been in prior times. The whole party system was fractured, Democratic Party and the Republican Party. It was 17 candidates for the presidency out of the Republican Party, two very different candidates for the Democrats, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The country was all over the place in terms of viewpoints. People dividing themselves up on identity basis, not just over individual identities, cultural identities, gender identities, racial identities, but also in terms of partisan identities. You're either blue or you're red or you're Democrat or Republican, even though there's an awful lot of us, well myself included, who don't fit into those categories. But this was a great environment for an intervention by someone like Vladimir Putin and the Russian Security Services. You and I have studied this for a very long time. They knew exactly how to push buttons, and boy, did they push our buttons.

So part of our problem now as we look ahead is how we deal with that because we have to have a collective front. So if anybody who's listening out there thinks to themselves in kind of, "This identity, that identity," Putin doesn't care. He doesn't care whether you think of yourself as a Democrat or Republican. He thinks about America. He's got Russia's unified interests in the foremost part of his thinking. He sees himself as an extension of the state or the state as an extension of him, depending on one's perspective there, and we are not like that.

Trump was all about himself, nothing to do with America or America first, just him, him, him. And now President Biden has a real difficulty that his own party's not pulling together behind him, let alone being able to bridge the divides over into the Republican Party, which is the party of one man. It's become the Trump Rump Republican Party, rather than the kind of sophisticated, complex party that it used to be prior to 2016. And that's our biggest problem.

To deal with Putin, we have to have collective, coherent, concerted pushback. So we need to have our act together and we have to have a coherent foreign policy stance that has everybody on the picture, not having members of the Senate just trying to win points politically by holding up ambassadors, which we actually need them in place. We need to have the forward-leaning push of the United States, and then we have to be able to work with our allies. I mean, this isn't an optimistic scenario, is it though, that I'm laying out here, because it's very difficult to do this.

Ian Bremmer:

Well no, I want to make it more pessimistic because you're talking about how the United States is not rowing together. And I mean, on China for example, there's been much more collective focus on foreign policy. On Russia, there has not been. But not only is that persisting, but now you have a situation where energy prices are higher. Nord Stream II Pipeline construction has been completed. Angela Merkel has left the scene. Olaf Scholz is the new Chancellor in Germany, not the person who was personally the leader of the Minsk dialogues on getting through Ukraine and trying to roll the Russians back.

I mean, is this a moment where Russian President Putin actually feels now that he has more influence, more ability to shake things up and see what falls from the tree than he really ever has at any point since the Soviet collapse?

Fiona Hill:

Absolutely, Ian. I mean, you've just laid it all out there. If you are Vladimir Putin and you're sitting and looking at all of this, everyone says, "Oh, the Russians have a weak hand," no, we have the week hand right now. The Russians know how to play and Putin knows how to play a weak hand very well, and it's not like we do because we've been so used to having, no pun intended here, all the trump cards in our hand. We have always thought of ourselves as being in the stronger position, having all of the leverage. And as you laid it out, we have very little at this particular point, and our own internal dysfunction becomes part of that.

So Putin looks at us and he sees a pretty weak state. Biden's having an incredibly difficult time getting legislation through. We flip and we flop from one policy to the next every time an administration comes in. We're just all over the place. The power of our example is fading around the world. All the polling shows that people no longer look at the United States as something to emulate. And then as you said, there's all of this other disarray: changes going on in Europe, energy crisis. Basically, this is the moment, COVID notwithstanding, and Russia having a hard time about that.

If you want to do something, be it military action, which has risks of its own because you can't calculate how everybody else is going to respond, including, and most importantly, the Ukrainians. This is about Ukraine. It's not about just the United States or Europe. But if you want to exert coercive diplomacy and take advantage, again, of all of these divisions and this polarization and mix things up and see what you can get out of it, now is the moment.

Again, to remember that Russians always have a different viewpoint based on different sets of circumstances. But I would probably be advising him to press ahead, certainly on the coercive diplomacy line. He himself, Putin, in a, I think it was a speech to his ambassadors not so long ago, basically said, "Great, we have these tensions in Europe. Let's keep those tensions mounted because now they're paying attention to us. We may be able to get something." So yes, you would want to keep the tensions uppermost. You want to have all eyes on you and all eyes on trying to figure out how to avert the real credible threat of military action.

And this is the point is that for Putin, and you and I have seen this over all the 21 years that he's been in power, Putin changed that kind of threshold for Russia. Russia, in the Yeltsin years when you and I were sort of starting out on our careers, was incredibly weak. The military was in disarray, the country was insolvent, and the constraints and the risks were serious, were severe. And Yeltsin also did try limited military action, moving troops around in Yugoslavia, making a dash to Prishtina Airport, for example, that people might remember during the whole Yugoslav-Balkan War to try to kind of get a beat on the United States military and kind of get ahead of the game. But there was so little that Yeltsin could do because of the greater risks.

For Putin, there's all kinds of different things that you can do. There's all kinds subversive covert means. Cyber, we've seen many times large-scale attacks. Paramilitary covert action, groups like the Wagner Group that are not part of the conventional military forces. There's all kinds of pressure that you can put on various regional leaders, corruption, kind of buying off opposition forces, helping to encourage coups. There was reports before that the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy thought that there was a coup being plotted against him. It wouldn't be the first time that this has happened. Encouraging others to predict across international borders on other countries, for example, assassinations, poisonings. You know, not to say the Russians haven't done any of this, right?

So there are an awful lot of things in your toolbox that other countries won't contemplate. And so I would be suggesting to President Putin, looking at the toolbox and the kind of things that you've done before and that you've tried to modulate, be very careful seeing how people react and basically keeping up the pressure to see what you can get out of this. The risk, of course, is again, what I said is of making that military threat really credible because you don't want to be seen as the country that's always calling the bluff.

And we do know, of course, that Russia has well and truly called the bluff in the past. They annexed Crimea. In 2008, as you and I were watching all of this happening also in real time, they moved into Georgia.

Ian Bremmer:

In Georgia, yeah.

Fiona Hill:

They intervened in Syria after warning us that they did not want to see Assad removed in 2015. And there are many different other occasions that we can talk about them actually taking that action. They crossed that threshold of using the military as a tool that Yeltsin was not able to cross because of the risks. So they're always calculating the risks. So I'd say calculate the risks very carefully, try to think about different things in the toolbox to keep up the pressure.

But then the problem comes, as we are going along here, how does everybody, what are you getting out of this? Are you framing the table for a big sit down to see if you're getting a post-Cold War settlement that you've been asking for the last 30 years, that Russia's been asking for? Are you trying to get something kind of more narrowly focused? Is this about the US-Russia relationship? It really depends, at this point, about what the goals are of Putin and the people around him, about what the advice would be.

Ian Bremmer:

The final question I want to ask you, if you think about the NATO member countries, and here I'm thinking specifically about the Baltic States, I'm thinking specifically about Poland, do you believe that American defense and security guarantees to those NATO countries are adequate, the NATO multilateral guarantees to those countries are today adequate, given where Russia is? And if not, what would you suggest we do to strengthen them?

Fiona Hill:

Well, again, it depends on what we think is going to be the nature of the threat. So if we're worried about Russian tanks rolling over into one of the Baltic States, for example? Or are we talking about issues? Are we talking about covert action? Are we talking about political pressure?

What has to be adequate is taking all of these contingencies into consideration and then thinking about how we're postured to deal with that. I do think we need an awful lot more work on financial flows, on cleaning up corruption, working more closely with our allies on closing up all these loopholes for shell companies, following the money, rooting out and basically holding to account corrupt politicians in our own countries because that is part of the problem as well of infiltration and influence, regulating our social media platform so that the Russians can't do again what they did in 2016, having public-private partnerships to look out for ransomware attacks or other hacking and intrusion episodes.

So what we need is a kind of an educate-postured response on all of those fronts. And a lot of it is about our own resilience and shoring up our own defenses. And that gets back to where I started from is we have to get our own act together, clean up our own acts, but also, try to get a bit more cohesion in our societies because one of the things that Putin himself focuses on, as you all know, is unity, unity inside of Russia, but then taking advantage of disunity abroad. And that should be a lesson to all of us because Putin loves our disunity. It's incredibly useful as a tool to exploit in that toolkit that he has, but he prizes, most of all, his unity.

And I'm not suggesting that we go over trying to ferment disunity in Russia. In the past, in the Soviet period, we used to try to do that. This time, we need to focus on our own unity, so internal in the United States, bridging these divides, getting rid of this kind of partisan intoxication that we seem to have at the moment, and then figuring out how we revitalize all of those ties with key allies in the transatlantic space.

It's a tall order though. This is really problematic. It's one of the reasons I keep speaking out and just saying, "Look, we have become a national security crisis. We are a national security problem to ourselves." As we rip ourselves apart, we make ourselves exquisitely vulnerable. And there are adversaries out there who are watching this, and as we kind of go after each other in these partisan battles, try to yell at each other, accuse people of doing things, attack people's credibility or impune the principles or whatever, others are just watching in the wings to see what advantage they can take from that.

Ian Bremmer:

Important stuff. Fiona Hill, thanks so much for joining today.

Fiona Hill:

Thanks so much, Ian. It's great to be with you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. How can sports change the world for the better? On The Long Game, a co-production of Foreign Policy and Doha Debates, hear stories of courage and conviction, both on and off the field, directly from athletes themselves. Ibtihaj Muhammad, Olympic medalist and global change agent, hosts The Long Game. Hear new episodes every week on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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