AI transcript
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0:01:35 Episode 341.
0:01:38 341 is the area code covering California’s East Bay Area.
0:01:41 In 1941, Captain America debuted.
0:01:44 What’s the similarity between politicians and Marvel characters?
0:01:48 They’re now fighting amongst themselves to stay in business.
0:01:52 Go, go, go!
0:02:04 Welcome to the 341st episode of the Prop G-Pod.
0:02:04 I didn’t like that joke.
0:02:08 It was an attempt to be clever, but I didn’t think it was that funny.
0:02:10 I just, I gotta go back to the dick stuff.
0:02:12 Anyways, welcome to the pod.
0:02:12 What’s happening?
0:02:23 I’ve been to Tulum a bunch.
0:02:26 People say it’s really affected and overly expensive.
0:02:30 It’s basically kind of like granola, sort of four-star service, six-star prices.
0:02:33 Although, Mexico is absolutely my favorite place to vacation in the world.
0:02:34 I think it’s the best value.
0:02:42 And I do like the idea of being on the beach all day, pretending to be healthy so you can go out and abuse hallucinogens and listen to a DJ for, you know,
0:02:44 a $700 bottle of alcohol.
0:02:45 Yeah, that makes sense.
0:02:46 Namaste.
0:02:47 Namaste.
0:02:49 Anyways, I love it there.
0:02:51 This was a different type of trip.
0:02:51 It was a wedding.
0:02:58 It was a mix of fabulous and nice people who seemed to be really, I don’t know, into being together and celebrating people’s love.
0:03:00 Their love for one another.
0:03:02 Anyway, very much enjoyed it.
0:03:04 Back in the UK, it is a spectacular day.
0:03:06 Living in London is like living in San Francisco.
0:03:07 I used to live in San Francisco.
0:03:11 And the nine nights a year that you could actually dine outdoors, no one was ready for it, so we didn’t know what to do.
0:03:12 We were paralyzed.
0:03:14 And it is such a beautiful day here today.
0:03:16 I don’t know how to respond.
0:03:17 I don’t know if I should take a walk.
0:03:18 I don’t know if I should take my dogs out.
0:03:20 I just don’t know what to do.
0:03:24 I’m so flummoxed by this round, hot, yellow thing in the sky.
0:03:26 Anyways, need to get settled.
0:03:26 Need to get back in.
0:03:28 I slept for 11 hours last night.
0:03:29 I haven’t done that in a while.
0:03:30 I mean, crazy.
0:03:33 Just absolutely crazy.
0:03:48 So up today, speaking of London, speaking of London and Europe and Russia, we have Dr. Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings, chancellor of Durham University, and a former U.S. National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs.
0:03:54 We discussed with Dr. Earl Trump’s role in the Russia-Ukraine war, the future of U.S.-Russia relations, and the broader geopolitical effects of the conflict.
0:03:56 I learned a lot from this conversation.
0:04:00 It’s a complex situation, but she kind of breaks things down in a pretty sober way.
0:04:03 I enjoyed sort of the way she framed everything.
0:04:08 I also like the fact I couldn’t figure out her politics, which I always enjoy in someone we interview.
0:04:11 Moving on, some news in the higher ed space.
0:04:17 Harvard announced we’ll offer free tuition for families earning $200,000 a year or less.
0:04:23 Also starting this fall, undergraduate students from families making under $100,000 will receive full coverage for tuition, housing, and food.
0:04:28 Even those earning above that could qualify for some aid, depending on factors including debt and cost of living.
0:04:36 Harvard estimates that 86% of U.S. families could now qualify for some level of financial assistance under the new system.
0:04:39 So I think this is a really nice press release.
0:04:41 They’ll get a lot of nice accolades for it.
0:04:42 And let me be clear.
0:04:49 I think this is fucking bullshit and a total misdirect from what is the underlying corruption that plagues Harvard and every other higher education institution.
0:04:49 Let’s break this down.
0:04:52 It’s not about affordability.
0:04:53 As a matter of fact, this makes things worse.
0:04:56 And that is, if you hit the lottery and you’re one of two things,
0:05:03 you’re either the child of a rich person or you’re freakishly remarkable, then you get shot into outer space of prosperity at an unbelievable speed of light.
0:05:05 You don’t even have, you don’t have to take on student debt.
0:05:09 But what about the middle class kid who’s just good, not great, who’s not freakishly remarkable,
0:05:23 and whose father doesn’t know somebody who has their name on the side of a Harvard building that gets arbitraged down from an elite university to an okay university that doesn’t have the endowment of Harvard and ends up taking out huge student loans for a credential that’s not nearly as powerful.
0:05:29 Because fucking Harvard won’t do what it’s supposed to do and should do and expand its freshman class.
0:05:30 This isn’t about affordability.
0:05:35 The Ivy League has been affordable for a long time because they have so much goddamn money.
0:05:37 This is an issue of accessibility.
0:05:39 This isn’t about who gets in.
0:05:40 That’s another misdirect.
0:05:41 Oh, isn’t it great?
0:05:44 60% of Harvard’s freshman class is non-white.
0:05:49 But wait, 70% of those people come from dual-income homes in the upper quintile of income earning a household.
0:05:53 So letting in the dot of a private equity Taiwanese billionaire is not diversity.
0:06:01 And giving a little bit of money away to people who couldn’t afford it or, quite frankly, are the ones who could afford to take out student loans because they’re going to graduate from fucking Harvard.
0:06:08 An average salary of undergrads, I think about 120 grads, average salary of HBS grads is about a quarter of a million first year.
0:06:10 They can afford student loans.
0:06:17 The people who can afford student loans are the ones that get arbitraged to less than universities because fucking Harvard’s full of people like myself who are narcissists.
0:06:28 And through a mix of arrogance and self-aggrandizement, put out press releases talking about financial aid when they should be putting out press releases saying, I know, let’s let in more people than a good Starbucks serves on a Tuesday.
0:06:46 If you had a drug, a pill, that would make you less likely if you took this pill to be depressed, more likely to get married, more likely to end up in civil service, less likely to kill yourself, much less likely to kill others, much less likely to be depressed, end up incarcerated,
0:06:50 end up being a ward of the state, would you hoard that drug?
0:06:54 Would you say, sorry, sorry, we have tens of billions of dollars.
0:07:03 We could distribute this drug to not just 1,500 people, but to 15,000 with absolutely no sacrifice in the quality of the freshman class.
0:07:04 Oh, that would hurt the brand.
0:07:05 Bullshit.
0:07:08 When I got into UCLA, the admissions rate was 76%.
0:07:08 Now it’s 9%.
0:07:12 It wasn’t exactly a Joey Bag of Donuts brand back then.
0:07:17 Whether it’s owning a house or having a degree from an elite institution, this is what we’re going to do to you young people.
0:07:30 We’re going to come up with all sorts of virtue signaling and talk about research and talk about brand and essentially say, okay, if you’ve got a shit ton of money you get in, and if you’re freakishly remarkable, that’s the Vaseline we rub over the lens of this corruption.
0:07:33 It’s not about affordability, it’s about access.
0:07:49 And if these universities that have an endowment over a billion dollars don’t expand their freshman class faster than population growth, regardless of the bullshit press releases they put out around financial aid, which is literally the dandruff off their fucking sleeves that means nothing, then they should lose their tax-free status.
0:07:50 Because they’re no longer public servants.
0:07:52 They think they’re fucking Birkin bags.
0:07:54 That was a rant.
0:07:57 With that, here’s our conversation with Dr. Fiona Hill.
0:08:04 Dr. Hill, where does this podcast find you?
0:08:08 It finds me in my office at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
0:08:09 Good.
0:08:11 Let’s bust right into it.
0:08:13 We’re recording this on Tuesday.
0:08:18 Trump is speaking with Putin today, ostensibly, to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.
0:08:25 Give us what you believe is the state of play, what each party wants from this, and what you think the likely outcome will be.
0:08:35 Well, it’s actually a pretty complicated situation because we’re tending to see this in a bilateral sense between the U.S. and Russia, and also then with Russia and Ukraine.
0:08:42 President Trump has inserted himself into what he’s basically saying is a conflict with two sides, with Ukraine and Russia.
0:08:44 But it’s far beyond that.
0:08:56 Russia’s been supported certainly since well into the war in the first year in 2022 by an array of other countries and its ability to continue the fight with Ukraine.
0:09:01 It’s gone from being a special military operation to the largest land war in Europe since World War II.
0:09:05 China, North Korea, and Iran have come in on Russia’s side.
0:09:13 Initially, on the parts of Iran and North Korea, to provide Russia with all kinds of ammunition and drones that it didn’t actually have in its arsenal.
0:09:23 And China has facilitated the transfer of all kinds of other dual-use products, although it hasn’t actually actively supported Russia in the same way as Iran and North Korea.
0:09:28 There are North Korean troops fighting against Ukrainians on the Russian side.
0:09:31 And the Iranians have been building drone factories in Russia.
0:09:37 And I want to put that on the table because it just shows how complicated this whole situation is.
0:09:41 And on the part of Ukraine, obviously, Ukraine is a European country.
0:09:48 And this has really serious implications for all of Ukraine’s immediate neighbors, including the Baltic states and Poland,
0:09:56 because Belarus, which is another supposedly independent country which Russia is in a tight union-like arrangement with,
0:10:01 has been used as a launching pad for the war into Ukraine as well.
0:10:05 Belarus directly borders the Baltic states and also Poland.
0:10:10 And, of course, for Europe, this is an existential European security issue.
0:10:21 They’re under assault 24-7 from Russia one way or another, either by cyber attacks or critical national infrastructure attacks, poisonings, assassinations, all kinds of things, sabotage operations.
0:10:39 It’s just been announced in the last day or so, right ahead of these negotiations, that the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, are being held responsible for arson attacks at shopping centers in Poland and also in Lithuania, as well as other sabotage attacks at warehouses around Europe.
0:10:42 So, this is a very complicated situation.
0:10:45 Trump wants to get FaceTime with Putin.
0:10:49 I mean, we should already anticipate, I think, that he’s had a whole host of phone calls.
0:10:57 I find it hard to believe that Steve Whitcoff has been talking for hours with Putin without any other sets of interactions with President Trump in the meantime.
0:11:05 And, basically, what President Trump wants is Ukraine put to one side so that he can get on with having a big deal with Russia.
0:11:22 We’ve heard reports today coming out of Russia that there are plans for the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Russian Space Agency, and others to meet with Elon Musk to talk about space collaboration, including with Musk’s aim of getting to Mars.
0:11:30 I mean, remember, of course, that the Soviet Union and Russia were the countries that put the first satellite, the first dog, the first man, the first woman in space.
0:11:36 And, obviously, a personal dream of Musk, not just to access space, but also to get to Mars.
0:11:37 So, there’s a lot going on here.
0:11:46 And in the midst of all of this is Ukraine that was basically fighting for its survival, and Russia wants a maximalist approach still with Ukraine.
0:11:56 It’s been very apparent from all the statements coming out of Russia that Putin is not prepared at all to concede beyond the goals that he laid out at the beginning of this conflict,
0:12:02 which was taking control, one way or another, of key territories in Ukraine and having a say about where Ukraine goes in the future.
0:12:16 So, it feels to me like Putin and Trump are, to a certain extent, negotiating against themselves in the sense that without Ukraine or Europe at the table, they can agree to whatever they want.
0:12:24 It feels to me that they’re under the impression they get to decide what happens here without getting the OK from Europe, who’s been providing 60% of the funding,
0:12:30 or the people actually doing the fighting who would have to put down their weapons, which is the Ukrainian people and their army.
0:12:36 Isn’t this a bit of a, quite frankly, more symbolic than real in terms of what actually happens?
0:12:38 I’m completely with you, Scott.
0:12:39 I mean, it’s not naive at all.
0:12:45 And I think you’re just calling it like you see it, which I think is how most people see it, you know, including in Europe and in Ukraine.
0:12:48 President Trump was recently on Air Force One.
0:12:56 I think yesterday I was reading, you know, some reports where he was talking about how over the weekend he got it all worked out in Mar-a-Lago.
0:12:58 Well, who was he working it out with, his own team?
0:13:06 You know, there’s a lot of, you know, as you’re putting it here, negotiating with ourselves on the US side, or at least, you know, Trump and his immediate circle.
0:13:16 A lot of talking to Putin going on, Steve Wyckoff, you know, meeting with Putin for many hours and hearing Russia’s side of the argument here.
0:13:19 And then them going to Ukraine and putting a lot of pressure on Ukraine.
0:13:25 And as you’re also pointing out, the Europeans have had to basically go into a parallel negotiation channel.
0:13:35 I mean, it’s certainly the case that we’ve had President Macron of France, Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom, and others were trying to interact with President Trump on this.
0:13:44 But it really feels, in many respects, like they’re fighting, in some respects, a rearguard action diplomatically, trying to kind of figure out, you know, how on earth they salvage something from this.
0:13:51 It really smacks, not just of 19th century or early 20th century secret diplomacy, but frankly, of 18th century.
0:13:58 Trump is going to preside next year over the 250th anniversary of American independence, you know, the American Revolution.
0:14:06 And at that same time frame, if you kind of look back to that later part of the 18th century, there was all kinds of diplomacy going on in Europe over the heads of other countries.
0:14:09 There was the partition of Poland, you know, for example.
0:14:11 We’re in that kind of historic space.
0:14:18 And that’s, you know, something that most of us would never have anticipated, you know, given how far we’ve gone in this last 250 years.
0:14:25 But we seem to be just right back to that whole period where great powers just think that they can carve up the world and then make everybody else go along with it.
0:14:28 I always like to ask what could go right.
0:14:38 And let me outline a scenario and you tell me if you think there’s any veracity or likelihood or if I’m just, you know, there’s too many biases in my scenario here.
0:14:42 But the EU combined has an economy of $19 trillion.
0:14:44 You listed North Korea.
0:14:51 They’re basically, I mean, they have, they’re willing to send their kids into a meat grinder, but their economy is about, I think, about $30 billion.
0:14:53 Iran’s is $500 billion.
0:14:57 China, obviously, that’s a huge economic power.
0:15:04 But my sense is they actually have a vested interest in keeping this war going because they get to get oil on sale from Russia because no one will buy their oil.
0:15:14 If the EU gets its act together, coordinates their incredible military infrastructure, they have great military, great weapons manufacturers, they have incredible IP.
0:15:26 If they could find the resolve to coordinate and perhaps, you know, make the requisite commitment, take their defense spending from 1.9 to 3%, which they’ve stated, quite frankly, they don’t need the Americans.
0:15:37 Isn’t there a silver lining here that Europe can actually do what they did in 1939 and say, no, we’re not backing down to a murderous autocrat, regardless of whether the U.S. backs us or not?
0:15:44 Isn’t there an opportunity here for Europe to become a union and push back on their own with or without the U.S.’s help?
0:15:45 There absolutely is.
0:15:48 And I think we’re seeing some signs of this already.
0:15:55 There’s just a couple of issues that are probably, you know, quite significant obstacles right now, but it doesn’t mean to say that they can’t be overcome.
0:15:56 And I think you’ve laid it out perfectly.
0:16:02 And, you know, you didn’t also talk about the limited extent of the Russian economy.
0:16:06 And there’s a lot of talk about trades being restored between the U.S. and Russia.
0:16:14 But when we look back to the previous levels of trade, the volumes of trade between Russia and the United States, it was the same level as the U.S. and Costa Rica.
0:16:19 So it just reinforces the point that you’ve made and you’ve laid out there, you know, very succinctly.
0:16:32 The obstacles are really that we’re seeing in aggregate a lot of the efforts being taken by the European Union to basically put money on the table for reinvigorating the defence and manufacturing sector of Europe.
0:16:35 And of course, not all of the key countries are members of the EU.
0:16:44 The UK famously took itself out with Brexit and that’s obviously the UK revitalising its manufacturing sector will be pretty critical here.
0:16:47 You’ve got Norway, which, of course, has a major sovereign wealth fund.
0:16:56 And as you’ve pointed out, is also a major arms and manufacturing power, obviously not to the kind of scale of others, but it’s pretty significant.
0:17:05 You’ve also got Turkey, which is a NATO member and has a really serious manufacturing capacity and also pretty serious military capabilities as well.
0:17:13 And Switzerland, which is in obviously a strange position debating its own neutrality, but also has a lot of capacity in manufacturing, including in the weapons sphere.
0:17:16 So absolutely, there is an opportunity there.
0:17:24 The obstacles is getting past these seeming constraints of who’s in what and actually agreeing to work on this together.
0:17:32 I think we’re seeing signs of that because you are seeing all kinds of different meetings going on, all kinds of agreements of pooling funds and pooling some of this manufacturing capability.
0:17:45 But the second obstacle is really speed because, you know, the US is barreling along on this path or Trump is barreling along on this path towards a ceasefire and is also cutting relationships with Europeans at the same time.
0:17:47 These tariffs are essentially a sanction on your allies.
0:18:00 And if you’re imposing tariffs on the EU and on other European countries that might not be part of the EU, but a part of NATO, you’re making hostile claims against your NATO allies, including Denmark over Greenland.
0:18:04 Remember, Greenland is actually a member of NATO through its association with Denmark.
0:18:08 You’re menacing Canada and imposing enormous tariffs on Canada.
0:18:12 And remember, Canada is also a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
0:18:18 You’re actually also then hobbling, you know, your allies at a time when they actually do have this opportunity to stand up.
0:18:38 So I think that, you know, what we’re going to have to see is European countries and Canada, which is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, really push back and get together and figure out ways in which they can actively cooperate on the military defense sector, as well as, as you’re suggesting, diversifying away from their reliance on the United States.
0:18:39 It’s long overdue, frankly.
0:18:41 I mean, they should have been doing this decades ago.
0:18:54 It strikes me that a lot of this comes down to resources or money and who’s going to foot the bill to continue the fight, if you will, or at least put us in a stronger position such that we can negotiate from a position of strength.
0:19:04 And it also strikes me that the most obvious and simplest means of funding the war for another two years is to seize Russian assets.
0:19:08 We have somewhere between $200 and $300 billion in Brussels.
0:19:16 And the fear is that people don’t want to do business with Russia or, excuse me, with the EU if they’re worried that geopolitically their assets can be seized.
0:19:27 I would argue that that incentive or disincentive to work with Europe is vastly dwarfed by the disincentive we should put in place not to invade your neighbor.
0:19:34 Your thoughts on seizing $200 to $300 billion in Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s fight?
0:19:39 There’s no question that this is the way that Europe should go.
0:19:50 I mean, a lot of the debate before was if the US, this is here, of course, in the United States, was that this could be, you know, very detrimental to trust in the US economy, in US financial markets, in the Treasury.
0:20:02 I mean, if we go back to Trump 1.0, for example, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was always extraordinarily concerned about the impact on the dollar and the dollar’s future as the reserve currency and the global currency.
0:20:08 There was too much emphasis all the time on the punitive side of financial sanctions.
0:20:30 Well, look, I mean, the United States, I think, is raising all of those questions, irrespective of all of that, again, by the tariffs, which is, again, sanctioning your allies, adding a value-added tax onto every particular product here, and just the kind of chaotic nature in which all of this is being played out, as well as the hostile rhetoric towards the allies.
0:20:39 So, at this particular stage, if there’d been any qualms on the European side that were basically being transmitted from the US, those should have gone.
0:20:47 And as Europe is now confronting the fact, as you’ve laid out very clearly here, that it’s pretty much going to be on its own in sort of dealing with the aftermath.
0:20:52 Because what Trump seems to suggest is, I’m going to give you a ceasefire and then I’m going to cut and run.
0:21:05 But, you know, we’re already, today as we’re recording this, looking at the breakdown of the ceasefire in Gaza, which Trump has made, you know, a lot of noise about and, you know, kind of basically put into place with greater claim.
0:21:10 That’s being basically pushed back on by Israel at this particular juncture.
0:21:16 So, we can’t really expect that a ceasefire or a truce is going to hold for any particular length of time.
0:21:18 The Russians are most likely to drag off the negotiations.
0:21:31 They’re likely to, you know, perhaps even agree to something, but again, with all of these preconditions and immediately, you know, look for some pretext to violate it again and put the blame on Europe or on the Ukrainians or both.
0:21:42 Which will put Europe in a very tricky position, where they’re going to basically need to move with speed, with real speed, to build up the defensive capacity.
0:21:55 And that is going to put the onus right back on the frozen assets, as you have suggested, along with basically the aggregate of their own capacities, which is, again, as you’ve said, pretty significant.
0:21:59 We’ll be right back.
0:22:06 This week on Unexplainable.
0:22:13 I, like, decided at some point in high school that I would dedicate my life to trying to do as much good as possible.
0:22:16 How a group of moral philosophers started a movement.
0:22:21 I think it appeals to young people. I think it feels like you can do anything.
0:22:22 Whose mission?
0:22:29 I think AI is one of the biggest threats, but I think we can aspire to guide it in a direction that’s beneficial to humanity.
0:22:32 To prevent the AI apocalypse.
0:22:35 I’m like, damn, I think I can actually move the needle on this.
0:22:38 Good Robot.
0:22:42 A four-part series about AI from Julia Longoria and Unexplainable.
0:22:43 Wherever you listen.
0:22:52 This week on The Verge Cast, we have questions about smartphones.
0:22:55 Questions like, why isn’t Siri better?
0:22:59 And where is the better Siri that Apple has been promising for a long time?
0:23:03 Questions like, why are all of our smartphones kind of boring now?
0:23:13 And why is it that all of the interesting ideas about how smartphones could look or how they could work or what they could do for you happening in countries like China and not in the United States?
0:23:21 We have answers, and we have some thoughts, and we also have a lot of feelings about what a smartphone is actually supposed to be in our lives.
0:23:36 I’m Josh Muccio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest.
0:23:44 For Lucky Season 13, we looked at 2,000 companies and selected 12 of the very best founders to pitch in Miami.
0:23:48 They flew in from all over the country and the world.
0:23:49 My name is Michele.
0:23:50 And I’m from Italy.
0:23:53 I’m originally from Medellin, Colombia.
0:23:55 I was born and raised in Maisel, Kentucky.
0:23:57 I’m from Baltimore, Maryland.
0:23:58 And I am from Finland.
0:24:07 This season, we’re diving even deeper into the human side of venture, as these founders pitch the sharpest early-stage VCs in the game.
0:24:10 I normally don’t like ed tech, but I really like you.
0:24:11 I echo those sentiments.
0:24:13 I do want to push back, though.
0:24:14 Toughen up there, lady.
0:24:15 That’s healthcare.
0:24:17 I feel like I’m the lone dissenter.
0:24:18 Ooh, Charles, spicy.
0:24:19 So I’m out.
0:24:23 I’m sure when they air this episode, they’ll be like, Charles was really dumb.
0:24:25 For those who can’t see, my jaw is currently on the floor.
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0:24:46 You listed China in the same group as Iran and North Korea in terms of their support of Russia.
0:24:53 And my impression, it might be the wrong impression, is that China wants to stay on good terms mostly with everybody.
0:25:00 And they’re being polite, maybe even supportive of Russia, but don’t want to alienate the rest of the world.
0:25:12 I mean, China, my sense is if China weighed in kind of feet first behind Russia in this conflict, it would be really, really meaningful.
0:25:17 Describe or give us some nuance to what you meant by the Chinese support of Russia in this conflict.
0:25:23 Yeah, I did say that it wasn’t the same as North Korea and Iran in terms of supplying weapons.
0:25:35 And frankly, there was other countries like India that have been sending, you know, kind of weapons to Russia because they have also very tight relationships with Russia on the arms sales side.
0:25:39 India traditionally got all of its weapons from the Soviet Union and also from Russia.
0:25:44 But India hasn’t rhetorically, you know, come out in support of Russia in the way that China has.
0:25:49 President Xi and President Putin have very close personal relationships.
0:25:54 You can’t basically underscore enough about how close that personal relationship is.
0:25:59 They have the same rough birth date, the same outlook on the world.
0:26:03 They’ve met each other more times than any other, you know, set of leaders.
0:26:23 And if you recall, just before Russia’s launch of its invasion of Ukraine, there was the meeting on the sidelines of the Beijing Olympics between the Winter Olympics, that is, between Putin and Xi, in which they declared basically a strategic bilateral relationship, a partnership without limits.
0:26:32 Now, the Chinese have been quick to try to point out that they didn’t realize that Putin was essentially going to move into Ukraine quite so soon afterwards.
0:26:38 I think there’s a lot of regret that, you know, a bit of buyer’s remorse there that they made this statement.
0:26:41 And then that was so soon on the heels of this invasion.
0:26:47 Of course, if it had turned out differently, it was indeed a special military operation, not this largest land war in Europe since World War II.
0:26:51 You know, China might have felt a little bit more sanguine about this.
0:26:59 But nonetheless, all the way through, the Chinese have made it very clear to Ukrainians and others that they do not want to see Russia lose.
0:27:05 Now, ironically, China was also the largest investor in Ukraine as a single country before the war.
0:27:06 They have no beef with Ukraine.
0:27:08 They’ve made that very clear to the Ukrainians.
0:27:09 They’ve also said this to the Europeans.
0:27:12 They see this as a proxy war against the United States.
0:27:15 And so they don’t want to see Russia lose.
0:27:19 Now, the interesting factor is that the United States is pulling out of this.
0:27:21 Trump has also recognized this.
0:27:23 He said that, you know, he never wanted to be part of this.
0:27:25 They’ve recently started to say this.
0:27:31 Now, the United States was never actually embarking on a proxy war against Russia.
0:27:39 Like Europeans, they were trying to basically help Ukraine defend itself, which Ukraine has every right to under the terms of the UN Charter.
0:27:45 And of course, it’s very similar to Kuwait, you know, back in the day and to other countries that have been invaded by a much larger neighbor.
0:28:01 But for China, basically, the failure of Putin to prevail in Ukraine would be very symbolic then of a mistake that would have been made by Xi in backing Putin as his horse in this race.
0:28:18 And so the Chinese have been saying to the Europeans, and I was at the Munich Security Conference in February, you know, through the infamous J.D. Vance speech there, but where the Europeans were hearing from the Chinese, a lot of pleasure, frankly, about the rift between Europe and the United States.
0:28:23 And China is saying to Europe, look, there was nothing personal in our support of Russia here.
0:28:24 I’m sure you understand our position.
0:28:27 And we’re going to be there for you, you know, when this war ends.
0:28:29 We’re going to help in terms of construction and investment.
0:28:37 You know, there’s been a great deal of desire on the Chinese part to pull away European countries from the United States.
0:28:39 But I think they’ve got a fundamental misreading of the situation.
0:28:43 In fact, they’re aiding and abetting this major war in Europe.
0:28:46 And in World War II, China was on the other side of the ledger, right?
0:28:48 I mean, China was part of the Allied powers.
0:28:53 Of course, that was in its war with Japan after all the Japanese invasions of China.
0:29:01 But this time, for the first time in history, China is on the wrong side from the European perspective of a major land war in Europe.
0:29:13 And again, even if it isn’t to the same extent as North Korea and Iran, China has been putting all of its focus on making sure that Putin and Russia are propped up and that they don’t fail in this endeavour.
0:29:14 And really, what is this endeavour?
0:29:18 It’s a slice and dice Ukraine and to dominate Europe.
0:29:31 So loosely, kind of a crude overview is that the world is bifurcating and it’s sort of the US and Europe and some of democracies globally, whether it’s Japan or Australia.
0:29:40 And then there’s Russia, Iran, North Korea, and to a certain extent, China.
0:29:41 And there’s some nuance there.
0:29:58 But just as the swing voter is the most important voter in the US, that small group of people that swing elections one way or the other, it feels as if this new swing voters in terms of size of economy and playing both sides a little bit are India and the kingdom.
0:30:04 And it sounds like you’re saying India, if you had to tilt them towards one side, it’s towards Russia.
0:30:08 One, I just want to confirm that that thesis is correct.
0:30:12 And two, I’m curious what the kingdom’s role in all of this is.
0:30:14 I think that’s a great observation, Scott.
0:30:15 And I’d just like to be a little clearer about India.
0:30:22 I don’t think they’re really tilted towards Russia in so much as that was the original relationship.
0:30:27 India and the Soviet Union, you know, had this very close relationship for decades.
0:30:29 And India was, of course, always unaligned.
0:30:31 And India just doesn’t want to choose sides.
0:30:36 And, of course, you know, where there’s an option for, you know, expanding some of the relationships, some of the arms sales.
0:30:40 I mean, the US didn’t kind of come through, you know, particularly quickly on offering an alternative.
0:30:48 And remember, of course, that India always feels itself in a standoff also with Pakistan, but very importantly with China.
0:30:53 We’ve had a real hot conflict on the border between China and India in the Himalayas.
0:30:58 That’s a hot dispute all the time where, you know, soldiers have died on the Indian side.
0:31:03 And India has always been wanting to try to see if it could indeed pull Russia away from China.
0:31:13 I think India has kind of given up on that idea, but it never quite basically gives up the ghost, but understands it has to keep this relationship with Russia.
0:31:16 India also wants to have a relationship with the United States.
0:31:28 It also, just to underscore, has deep interests in Europe, especially in the other kingdom, the United Kingdom, where you’ve got a kind of a reversal of the old colonial relationship.
0:31:31 India is a major investor in India.
0:31:39 There are, of course, very prominent Anglo-Indian populations, most notably Rishi Sunak, a former UK prime minister.
0:31:42 India has been heavily invested in steel and manufacturing.
0:31:53 India is also heavily invested in global education, has been building universities and all kinds of relationships with UK and other educational sectors.
0:31:54 So India is complex.
0:31:56 India doesn’t want to have to choose.
0:32:02 It wants to basically chart its own course, which, you know, fits back to the old role in the unaligned movement.
0:32:07 But as you know, you’re saying they’re very much a swing voter and a lot of complexity there.
0:32:13 In terms of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I think it’s absolutely fascinating that the role that they’re likely to play.
0:32:16 I’ve had a number of conversations with them in other settings as well.
0:32:17 It’s not just about Russia.
0:32:21 It’s not just about what’s happening with Iran in the region.
0:32:23 It’s not just about the United States either.
0:32:30 You’ve got to remember that also the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom have very close relationships.
0:32:33 Lots of investment by the Saudis in the UK.
0:32:43 And as the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund diversifies its activity, you know, in many respects, they’re going to be the financiers of lots of global projects.
0:32:57 I kept thinking as I was kind of listening to some of the things that the Saudis were saying, it’s almost like the Rothschilds of another century in terms of being the bankers, you know, to the world, not just to Europe and the crown heads of Europe with the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund.
0:33:04 They’re heavily thinking about what does Saudi Arabia become and what do they do beyond oil and gas?
0:33:06 So there’s a lot to look into there.
0:33:09 But beyond that, there’s Brazil, there’s South Africa.
0:33:16 I mean, Turkey is a kind of swing voter in the European and, you know, kind of broader Middle Eastern perspective.
0:33:25 We’ve seen Israel, you know, driving its own future and not being aligned with the United States on every front by any stretch of the imagination.
0:33:35 So, look, I think we’ve got a world here where there’s a lot of other powers, regional powers and some with global impacts who do not want to have to make a choice here.
0:33:40 They don’t want to be caught between the Russia or the United States and anywhere the United States seems to be coming over to the Russian perspective.
0:33:47 And they certainly don’t want to be a part of a world in which the United States, China and perhaps Russia are carving things up for themselves.
0:33:51 And within that, I mean, Europe gets back to where you started with.
0:34:07 Europe itself, in its various different connotations of EU, European members of NATO, if they start to, you know, set up their own sub-NATO regional alliances, could all play swing roles in all of these issues.
0:34:14 So this is not a world dominated just by great powers in the old 18th, 19th or 20th century.
0:34:17 The 21st century is a much more complex and messy place.
0:34:25 So, you’ve worked on Russia policy across three different administrations, Bush, Obama, and Trump.
0:34:29 So I want to ask a more basic question.
0:34:37 And that is, it is difficult for a lot of us to understand the endgame here and the strategy behind what Trump’s approach to Ukraine.
0:34:41 It feels as if he started the negotiation with Russia by folding.
0:34:42 Like, okay, you can have everything.
0:34:44 Now let’s start the negotiation.
0:34:56 And from someone such as myself, who I think has a bias against Trump, it feels to me like Putin has agreed to buy billions of dollars of Trump coin.
0:35:04 And that in exchange, they’ve decided they’re going to have two spheres of influence between two autocrats and carve up the world for their own financial benefit.
0:35:13 Steel man, a more logical explanation of the current complexion of Trump as it relates to Ukraine.
0:35:16 In sum, what are they thinking?
0:35:17 What is the endgame?
0:35:20 Well, look, this isn’t about America, Scott.
0:35:20 Let’s be frank.
0:35:25 And, you know, if I really kind of think about it, I mean, you cover this a lot on your podcast.
0:35:26 It’s the kind of thing that I also look at.
0:35:30 This whole de-industrialization of the United States.
0:35:35 I wrote a book a few years ago about this in the United States, Russia, and, you know, UK context.
0:35:41 There’s a whole host of issues that have been decades in the making that need to be addressed.
0:35:46 And this isn’t one way of doing them, you know, basically a convergence between Russia and the United States.
0:35:49 It’s a convergence of autocratic thinking, to be honest.
0:35:53 I mean, we’re talking about the very top of our economic pyramid here.
0:35:58 And it’s really driven in a large part by Trump and his own worldview.
0:36:00 And I’ll get to that in a second, but also by people like Elon Musk.
0:36:06 I mean, Musk has a vested interest, I mentioned this earlier, in basically engaging directly with Russia.
0:36:08 And I think he’s been a big driver of this as well.
0:36:13 In part, it’s for Starlink and for the relay stations, the terrestrial relay stations.
0:36:14 He needs to have global coverage.
0:36:19 Russia is the largest territory in the world, you know, along with China and then, you know, Iran,
0:36:22 as well as the United States, Canada, all these giant countries.
0:36:27 You know, he needs to have those within his frame for his business to succeed.
0:36:29 And look at SpaceX.
0:36:37 It developed using, you know, the first rocketry and all of the systems developed first in the Soviet Union and Russia.
0:36:44 The first inventor of the rocket ship was a Russian scientist, an autodidact, very similar to Musk, frankly,
0:36:47 you know, back at the period before the Russian Revolution.
0:36:51 So the Soviet Union and Russia have been the pioneers in space.
0:36:59 And as I said, there’s now discussions going on about how to work for Musk with the Russian Space Agency,
0:37:02 the Russian Atomic Agency, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
0:37:04 So there’s that.
0:37:08 And then there’s also this great desire that Trump has had since the 1980s of doing business with the Soviet Union
0:37:13 and with Russia on a whole host of different fronts from his family perspective.
0:37:15 And that’s definitely out there.
0:37:19 And you mentioned cryptocurrency and all the other kinds of issues that are out there on the table.
0:37:22 So that’s a major part of this.
0:37:23 Of course, it is.
0:37:25 And it’s autocrat to autocrat, oligarch to oligarch.
0:37:27 You know, very similar sort of setup here.
0:37:31 It’s got nothing to do with Americans, particularly given back, as we said before,
0:37:35 about the paucity of the trade relationship between Russia and the United States in the past.
0:37:38 But it could be very significant in this few set of areas.
0:37:42 But the other thing is, and Trump is genuine about this,
0:37:49 he is extraordinarily concerned about the risk of World War III, nuclear Armageddon,
0:37:57 and, you know, the real risks that are still prevalent in the tense relationship between the United States and Russia
0:37:59 as it comes to nuclear weapons.
0:38:02 Next year is the end, the formal end of New START,
0:38:08 the Brahms Regulation Treaty that was first put into play in 2010,
0:38:13 the Biden administration extended it, but it expires now in 2026.
0:38:15 This is the year that you would have to negotiate something.
0:38:20 And Trump always has a fixation on nuclear weapons.
0:38:22 I think he’s a nuclear zero guy.
0:38:23 I’ve talked about this in, you know, other settings.
0:38:28 He would like to see, basically, a process in which he works with Putin
0:38:31 to lead towards a major arms reduction.
0:38:34 So the Super Trump Arms Regulation Treaty for a new start.
0:38:40 He wanted to do that in Trump 1.0, but it all got lost in the whole mix of the Mueller reports
0:38:46 and investigations and all of the drama about Russian interference in the 2016 and, you know,
0:38:50 2017 election and first parts of Trump’s presidency.
0:38:52 He could never get, you know, to that stage.
0:39:00 The Helsinki infamous meeting between Trump and Putin was supposed to start those strategic nuclear discussions.
0:39:05 That was basically the whole frame for those meetings in Helsinki,
0:39:12 just as Gorbachev and Reagan and Reagan and H.W. Bush had met in places like Helsinki and Reykjavik and Geneva in the past.
0:39:17 Trump has said multiple times that he wants to get back to this and he wants to get Ukraine out of the way.
0:39:22 He basically believes, when he said to Zelensky in the Oval Office, when you’re gambling with World War III,
0:39:27 that the real risk from his perspective, if it’s Ukraine dragging everybody into a conflict,
0:39:33 when he actually wants to get this gone off the page, he doesn’t like the slaughter of people either.
0:39:34 He’s genuine about that.
0:39:38 He really just doesn’t understand that for Putin, this is a price he’s willing to bear.
0:39:41 And for Ukraine, obviously, it’s a fight for their survival.
0:39:45 So, of course, you know, they’ve been engaged in this horrible fight.
0:39:47 But for Trump, this is just incomprehensible.
0:39:50 He wants it gone and he wants to sit down with Putin on nuclear weapons.
0:39:54 The problem with this thinking, of course, is that Ukraine was once a nuclear power.
0:40:00 It was part of the Soviet Union and it inherited, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, a strategic nuclear arsenal.
0:40:05 Admittedly, it didn’t inherit the command and control aspects of this, but it did have the weapons.
0:40:06 It had leverage.
0:40:13 And in 1990s, we pushed the United States and the UK as another nuclear power, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan,
0:40:16 to return those weapons or send those weapons.
0:40:21 It weren’t really turning them because they were on their soil to Russia for dismantling.
0:40:27 So after that, we gave promises and assurances to Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan that nothing bad would happen to them.
0:40:30 The UK signed that along with the United States and Russia.
0:40:31 And only the UK has taken that seriously.
0:40:34 Those assurances and guarantees.
0:40:38 And what this means is that Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons.
0:40:39 And what happened?
0:40:40 It got trashed.
0:40:43 Similar thing happened to Mama Gaddafi in Libya.
0:40:46 He was persuaded to give up nuclear weapons.
0:40:46 And what happened?
0:40:52 He got shot in a pipe, basically, you know, kidnapped and taken in by his rebels and his whole system
0:40:53 collapsed.
0:40:58 So this is a signal to the rest of the world, to the Indias, the Pakistans, the South Africans,
0:41:04 the Israels, all of the countries like Iran and North Korea that have been thinking about
0:41:11 or pursuing nuclear weapons, the Japans, the South Koreans, Taiwan and other European players,
0:41:15 that if you don’t have a nuclear weapon and you don’t have a guarantee by a nuclear power,
0:41:16 you’re in big trouble.
0:41:18 That’s the lesson of this.
0:41:23 And what’s more likely to happen than Trump being able to sit down with Putin and then
0:41:28 perhaps later with Xi, and he’s already made approaches to, obviously, North Korea in his
0:41:33 previous administration and now again to Iran for nuclear talks, is that you’re going to
0:41:37 end up instead of disarmament, but with more proliferation.
0:41:42 Because the message is that the United States doesn’t live up to its guarantees and its promises.
0:41:47 And why should the United States then be trusted as the nuclear guarantor for all of these
0:41:52 other countries that fall under it by treaty alliances, or the likelihood that they could
0:41:55 turn to the United States when they’re under duress?
0:41:57 So this is a huge problem.
0:42:02 It’s one of the key issues that is underappreciated about Trump.
0:42:03 He’s serious about this.
0:42:08 And I think to his credit, he’s serious about wanting to stop, as he puts it, the sense of
0:42:10 slaughter of young men at the front.
0:42:13 But he’s not really fully appreciating the dynamic.
0:42:15 Putin doesn’t care about all this death and destruction.
0:42:19 And also, why now would Putin give up the nuclear arsenal?
0:42:26 Because for Russia, that’s the ultimate guarantor and guarantee of its prowess on the battlefield,
0:42:32 its ability to force Ukraine to capitulate, and also its ability to deter Europe, the United
0:42:34 States and all these other countries.
0:42:38 And Putin has lowered the threshold for at least rhetorically talking about using nuclear weapons,
0:42:42 because he’s threatened, basically, to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainians when
0:42:45 he was losing on the battlefield in 2022.
0:42:48 So this is a really intensely difficult situation.
0:42:54 And although I think Trump is very sincere, I don’t think he’s fully grasping the implications
0:42:56 of some of the things that he’s done and said.
0:42:58 How do you think this plays out?
0:43:04 Many of us are just befuddled trying to figure out the incentive structure here, trying to figure
0:43:12 out geopolitically if Europe steps up the resolve of Russia, whether the US is in, out, in, out
0:43:15 regarding funding, intelligence, sanctions.
0:43:22 If you were trying to do scenario planning here, maybe it’s unfair to limit you to one outcome.
0:43:27 What do you think are the most likely scenarios for how this plays out through the rest of
0:43:28 25 and into 26?
0:43:33 Well, it is difficult because we’re not talking really about the United States, let’s be frank.
0:43:36 We’re talking about one guy and a group of people around him.
0:43:38 I mean, that is, you know, kind of unprecedented.
0:43:39 We’re talking about Trump.
0:43:44 Because I think for Putin, and sometimes I mix the two up myself, you know, because there’s
0:43:49 a very similar, you know, outlook and, you know, often sometimes game plan.
0:43:54 But there’s, and also in terms of, you know, the unchecked nature of their power.
0:44:00 But there’s a couple of very specific differences between the two, which are very important in
0:44:01 thinking about how this plays out.
0:44:04 First of all, Putin’s been in power for 25 years.
0:44:09 And the people around him, the people who’ve been around him for decades, they know their stuff.
0:44:11 They have a proper plan.
0:44:18 Basically, Putin wants to dominate again the regions that were formerly part of the Russian
0:44:20 Empire, formerly part of the Soviet Union, one way or another.
0:44:23 Doesn’t mean he’s going to send in tanks, you know, here, there and everywhere.
0:44:27 But he wants the veto on what they do, what they say, where they go.
0:44:30 And he certainly doesn’t want them to have any other options.
0:44:35 And he’s absolutely hell-bent, you know, on basically preventing the Europeans from getting
0:44:36 their act together as well.
0:44:39 There’s all these acts of sabotage, and I said, and psychological operations.
0:44:42 There’s an interference going on there all the time as well.
0:44:47 Now, Trump also doesn’t want Europe to get their act together, but, you know, for all kinds
0:44:47 of different reasons.
0:44:51 I mean, actually, Trump and Putin both don’t want to see NATO continue.
0:44:55 Trump thinks it’s because Europe rips him off, or rips the US off.
0:44:59 And he’s not wrong that Europe should have been doing a heck of a lot more for a lot longer
0:45:00 time about its own security.
0:45:05 And they should have got this message decades ago, not even just when Obama made the points
0:45:08 in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.
0:45:15 But there’s been every conceivable US administration going back to the 1960s and to Kennedy.
0:45:18 There’s been actually saying to Europe, come on, come on, you know, get going.
0:45:21 This is not just all reliance on the US time.
0:45:25 And that’s beyond, obviously, the strategic nuclear umbrella, but in terms of building
0:45:29 up and taking up more responsibility for their security.
0:45:33 Now, of course, Europe thought after 1989, this is great, peace, dividend, we can just
0:45:34 kind of move on and do other things.
0:45:38 But, you know, that message has still been coming through loud and clear.
0:45:41 So, actually, Trump now is basically saying the Europeans are right, you’re on your own.
0:45:43 That’s catnip for Putin.
0:45:44 That’s fantastic.
0:45:49 You know, the fact that Trump’s basically saying we’re not going to give Article 5 guarantees
0:45:51 to Europe unless it’s Article 5%.
0:45:56 They have to be paying 5% of their GDP, you know, and otherwise, you know, we might not
0:46:01 even contemplate supporting them under extreme circumstance.
0:46:03 That’s another thing that Putin’s been looking for.
0:46:08 So, I mean, basically, what I’m trying to say here is what it’s more likely to be is that
0:46:13 the United States is going to be supporting the Russian position because there’s so many
0:46:17 things that, you know, Trump actually also sees eye to eye with Putin on.
0:46:21 But we’re going to end up in an extraordinarily messy situation.
0:46:22 That’s really what I foresee.
0:46:23 I foresee my crystal ball.
0:46:24 It’s very cloudy.
0:46:28 There’s all kinds of, you know, things going on, you know, all over the place.
0:46:33 And in part, that comes down to the other big difference between Trump and Putin is Trump
0:46:34 is a totally one-man show.
0:46:36 He’s destroying the state.
0:46:42 He’s not acting with Congress and with the Senate, unless they’re like rubber stamps,
0:46:46 which actually for Putin also, the Russian doom and the Russian parliament is also a rubber
0:46:46 stamp.
0:46:48 But Putin operates within the state.
0:46:50 He’s a creature of the deep state.
0:46:52 He’s not dismantling the Russian state.
0:46:56 That was already dismantled, you know, under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin from the
0:46:57 Soviet and Russian times.
0:46:59 You know, the Russians have moved on beyond that.
0:47:07 He works through his state negotiators, Lavrov, the foreign minister, you know, for example,
0:47:10 his advisors, Ushakov, as well as through oligarchs and business people.
0:47:12 They all work for him.
0:47:15 And they’re all one very tight team.
0:47:18 For Trump, he doesn’t really pay any attention to any of the people around him.
0:47:21 He uses them as emissaries and envoys, but he doesn’t do his homework.
0:47:23 They can’t actually advise him on anything.
0:47:25 They just kind of come back.
0:47:27 God knows what kind of conversations they have.
0:47:28 Do they have notes?
0:47:30 Do they fully understand, you know, what they’ve heard?
0:47:32 And that makes Trump very unpredictable.
0:47:37 So I think if Putin’s looking at his own crystal ball, he also can’t say where this is going
0:47:37 to go.
0:47:41 He’s going to have to be constantly on the ball, not just the crystal ball, but on the other
0:47:44 ball, you know, trying to kind of figure out how he can push Trump in his direction.
0:47:50 And so things will change very dramatically if others push back, if the Europeans push
0:47:55 back, for example, or if any part of the US firmament pushes back as well.
0:48:00 If Congress, you know, suddenly realise that they’re a co-equal branch of government and
0:48:02 have their own powers, or if the Senate do.
0:48:05 So there’s all kinds of different constraints there.
0:48:11 And in Trump 1.0, Putin was very frustrated because he thought that Trump would already do
0:48:15 a lot of the things he’s already doing now, but there were all kinds of constraints.
0:48:17 So unfortunately, what I foresee here is a mess.
0:48:22 I could actually see that there could be a truce, there could be a ceasefire, but then
0:48:27 it’s when all of these other externalities, all of these other independent variables come
0:48:28 into play.
0:48:33 So, you know, I fear that we’re going to be in this very messy situation for some time,
0:48:40 but gets back to what you said again, there could be a more positive outcome if the Europeans
0:48:42 move very quickly to get their act together.
0:48:46 And there are signs of that, but they’ve got to have the political will.
0:48:52 And they’ve also got to realise that they can’t depend on the United States, and that they
0:48:55 also have to kind of come up with some kind of solution there.
0:49:00 So, I mean, maybe we should revert back onto this, you know, in a kind of a few weeks, also
0:49:02 to see where we are, because the situation is incredibly fluid.
0:49:05 We’ll be right back.
0:49:19 We’re back with more from Dr. Fiona Hill.
0:49:23 So I want to transition.
0:49:28 You’re the Chancellor of Durham University, one of the UK’s top institutions, and I would
0:49:31 just love to get, but you’re also very familiar with the US.
0:49:36 And the US does a small number of things really, really well.
0:49:37 We’re great with technology and software.
0:49:38 We’re great at media.
0:49:40 We make the best weapons in the world.
0:49:45 And I would argue that on a balanced scorecard, we dominate higher education, which isn’t to
0:49:51 say there aren’t other pockets of outstanding higher ed, including in the UK, but as the
0:49:56 leader of a UK higher ed institution, how would you compare and contrast higher education in
0:49:59 the UK versus the US, and what can we learn from each other?
0:50:03 Well, there’s a lot of interesting lessons there, and I know, Scott, that you pay a lot
0:50:04 of attention to this.
0:50:07 So I actually also, I’m on the board of overseers of Harvard.
0:50:10 I was elected to that just a couple of years ago.
0:50:14 And of course, I came to the United States, as many people did, to study.
0:50:19 I came in 1989, and I came because there was much more opportunity in the US system.
0:50:21 I had a full scholarship from Harvard.
0:50:22 You know, my father was a coal miner.
0:50:28 There was, you know, no real opportunities for education for his generation.
0:50:33 And, you know, my generation was lucky that, you know, I had a reasonably good level of elementary
0:50:34 schooling.
0:50:37 My secondary school wasn’t great, but there was this opportunity for scholarships.
0:50:42 I went to university in the UK to St. Andrews, basically funded by my local education authority.
0:50:47 But the real step up, as you’re basically hinting at here, was when I came to Harvard.
0:50:49 I was blown away by the resources.
0:50:53 You know, of course, I studied history and Russian and, you know, all the things that I’m
0:50:54 using today.
0:50:56 And there was that aspect also.
0:51:02 The founding of the Russian Research Centre, other regional studies centres, the massive investment
0:51:04 in language study history.
0:51:10 I studied with Richard Pipes, one of the greatest, you know, figures in Russian history, for example,
0:51:12 is one of his last graduate students.
0:51:18 All of that was greatly admired around the world, as well as all of the scientific research,
0:51:22 biosciences that has been started off by the US.
0:51:26 Of course, that was one of the secrets of the United States success after World War II, was
0:51:30 this massive investment in education and in research.
0:51:35 And the difference with the UK, which is the closest proximate to the United States, is it’s
0:51:36 all the public sector.
0:51:40 So the role that I have at Durham as the Chancellor is more as an ambassador.
0:51:43 I have a non-fiduciary, you know, role at the institution.
0:51:51 The 140 plus UK universities are almost all the basically public, publicly funded by the
0:51:55 government, which, of course, has all kinds of constraints on this, because it’s very
0:51:59 difficult for them to build up the kind of private endowment and investments that you
0:52:00 see in the US.
0:52:02 Only a few universities have managed to do that.
0:52:06 Oxford and Cambridge, most notably to some degree, St. Andrews, where I was a undergraduate
0:52:07 and also Durham.
0:52:10 But, you know, these are really small in comparison.
0:52:16 And they are very dependent also on student fees, which are capped, and, you know, also,
0:52:18 you know, kind of on international students.
0:52:23 And they don’t have the research capacity that the US does.
0:52:27 And there’s one thing that I think most people in the United States are completely unaware of,
0:52:35 is that the United Kingdom, through its UK research and innovation funds, and Germany and many
0:52:38 other countries invest heavily in US higher education.
0:52:43 They’re also, for the big universities like Harvard, are on bond markets and on the international
0:52:46 markets as investment opportunities.
0:52:49 And all of this is going to take an enormous hit.
0:52:55 You know, some of this freezing of grants and, you know, funding that we’ve already seen through
0:52:56 NIH, etc.
0:53:02 There’s also matching funding from Germany, from the UK and, you know, from other countries.
0:53:05 Huge investments in the US higher education.
0:53:11 Also, students, you know, all of this movement now to expel students who own visas and green
0:53:16 card holders, you know, irrespective of, you know, the circumstances around this is going
0:53:17 to have a huge chilling effect.
0:53:23 The cutting of NIH grants, the cutting of USAID, you know, the federal funding, looking at what’s
0:53:29 just happened to Johns Hopkins, you know, for example, 800 million of money earner that’s
0:53:31 gone from USAID that was on global public health.
0:53:35 I mean, again, these are all areas that other countries were heavily invested in.
0:53:39 So I actually think that, you know, what’s happening right now is the killing of the golden
0:53:39 goose.
0:53:44 Because another thing that I know from the US and the UK perspective is that universities are
0:53:47 anchor institutions in the regions.
0:53:54 And it’s not just private Ivy League universities that are key in the United States.
0:53:59 It’s obviously the public and land grant universities, which were set up in the 1860s to the 1890s.
0:54:05 Other intermediate universities, community colleges, they all have a huge impact in terms of the
0:54:08 revenue that they generate and in terms of the jobs and employment.
0:54:12 In the UK context, for example, in the northeast of England, which is one of the poorest regions
0:54:21 in Europe, let alone in the UK, 2.2 billion annually is generated just by the cluster of
0:54:24 universities there, including Durham, which is the largest of the research universities.
0:54:29 You know, in terms of the United Kingdom at large, you know, there’s something almost at
0:54:36 800,000 jobs and literally tens of billions in the hundreds of billions of revenue every year.
0:54:38 And of course, you scale that up even larger.
0:54:44 You think about Massachusetts, Boston, all of the economies of these regions, research triangle
0:54:51 in North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon driving change
0:54:52 in those cities.
0:54:58 It’s not just in the, you know, the coast, it’s in the old industrial heartlands where change
0:55:00 has been driven by universities.
0:55:05 University of Idaho, the University of Nebraska, all of these universities are taking huge hits.
0:55:08 This is going to have enormous ripple effects across the entire country.
0:55:11 So I can’t resist.
0:55:13 I didn’t realize you’re on the board of overseers of Harvard.
0:55:20 So my sense is that there’s just a different zeitgeist in higher ed, or one of the differences
0:55:26 is that people in the UK think of universities as sort of a public good, and they don’t feel
0:55:31 the same obligation or gratification or ego boost by giving money back to the university.
0:55:38 I just pulled up that the endowment at Durham is 110 million pounds or about $140 million.
0:55:39 Is that accurate?
0:55:40 That’s about right.
0:55:40 Yeah.
0:55:46 And I’ve actually, you know, given money myself to the university out of my recent book, you
0:55:50 know, for the small stipends and, you know, bursaries for the students.
0:55:56 It’s just not the same scale that it is here in the U.S., including for the public, you
0:56:00 know, and land-grant universities, you know, the big state universities where people tend
0:56:04 to, you know, to give money as well, high schools, the whole education sector.
0:56:10 But where I was headed with it was, Harvard, I believe, has a $53 billion endowment, and it
0:56:13 lets in 1,500 people a year.
0:56:20 And in the U.S., I believe that higher ed, that we’re basically the enforcers of the
0:56:25 caste system, that we have, we create artificial scarcity despite having the resources to dramatically
0:56:30 increase our freshman seats such that we can feel better about ourselves and the value of
0:56:35 the degree goes up for the incumbents at the cost of the entrance and society real large.
0:56:43 Do you think there’s an issue with a place like Harvard, with $53 billion endowment letting
0:56:47 in 1,500 kids a year, do you think the accusation that it’s a hedge fund with offering classes
0:56:50 and not really a public servant, do you think there’s some truth to that accusation?
0:56:53 Well, I think that’s an issue that the university is addressing.
0:56:56 I mean, it’s one of the reasons that I ended up, you know, honestly on the board of overseers.
0:57:00 There’s kind of like this view on the outside, you know, that this is some kind of, you
0:57:03 know, kind of weird start-game setup, but there’s a lot of people from all kinds of diverse
0:57:09 backgrounds there. And I came there as first generation. I mean, my father left school at
0:57:14 14, went down a coal mine, my mother became a nurse, but also left school at 16. You know,
0:57:20 so basically I came from a family with absolutely no means whatsoever, nothing, no savings. And
0:57:25 basically I got to Harvard on a scholarship. I was immediately struck, you know, by many of
0:57:29 the things that you’re talking about there. I’ve given money back, you know, for scholarships
0:57:34 for people like, you know, myself and at the board, and there’s been a lot more discussion
0:57:38 and there’s been a lot more discussion going on at the university over, you know, the last
0:57:42 several decades because they’ve got people like Raj Chetty and others, you know, kind of pushing
0:57:47 out and research this. A man named Anthony Jackson Education School making these same, you know,
0:57:52 kinds of cases. The university has been discussing this in their admissions for some time now.
0:57:57 Many of the people who have come to prominence were first generation. And in fact, the university
0:58:06 just this week announced basically an expansion of its financial aid to students coming from families
0:58:11 would be prospective students who, you know, are in those lowest brackets. But it has to do more
0:58:16 in terms of expanding its access. And there’s all kinds of discussions about this going on
0:58:20 about different platforms. I think the argument could be, well, you know, this could have been
0:58:25 done a lot more quickly. And Harvard and other major universities like it have to actually show
0:58:29 leadership. So there’s absolutely there needs to be this kind of debate about higher education.
0:58:34 But I think the solution to it is not destroying it. And in fact, it’s really getting universities
0:58:38 like the Ivy Leagues, those with the big endowments to work across the entire education sector,
0:58:44 not just higher ed, with trade schools, with community colleges, with the public land grants and
0:58:49 state level universities. So while you’re coming up with these kinds of ideas, I think what we have to
0:58:54 really kind of push the educational sector, and I keep saying educational sector, because I think it
0:58:58 has to be high schools, it has to be libraries, and all the other, you know, kind of parts of all this,
0:59:03 is to kind of find ways of working together. I was just at a conference in Houston, a week ago,
0:59:09 of all the associations that deal in international education. So this is language instruction,
0:59:14 study abroad, you know, and this is not just the elite universities. I mean, I was a kid, you know,
0:59:20 from again, from a mining community, the British underwrote, study abroad, this is a, you know,
0:59:28 mind expanding opportunity and a life changing opportunity for people. So I’m, you know, look,
0:59:31 I’m in agreement that there’s something needs to be done, and something quite drastic. We can’t just
0:59:34 talk about this for another decade. We’re in the crisis now.
0:59:40 Dr. Fiona Hill is a senior fellow at Brookings, chancellor of Durham University, and a former U.S.
0:59:45 National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs. Dr. Hill gained
0:59:50 national recognition for her testimony during the 2019 Trump impeachment inquiry. She’s also a
0:59:56 best-selling author and leading expert on geopolitics. Dr. Hill very much enjoyed this conversation and
1:00:03 hope and trust that we’ll have you on again. Really, really, I love how sort of just sober and calm in
1:00:08 the way you deliver or try to break down or distill what are very complex issues. Really appreciate
1:00:09 your time. No, thank you so much, Scott.
1:00:32 Algebra of happiness. What makes a great day for you? For a long time for me, that was if I worked out. If I work
1:00:38 any given day, I feel like, okay, that was at least a reasonable to good day. That I exercised,
1:00:43 I feel more mentally set. I’m sort of, I’ve always had body dysmorphia. I always feel kind of weak and
1:00:49 skinny. So working out makes me feel better about myself. It’s good for me mentally. I associate a lot
1:00:55 of good things with working out. So any day I worked out was a good day. That has changed for me. And that
1:01:01 is now my new sort of go-to around this is a good day, is if I can FaceTime with my oldest son,
1:01:06 who’s at boarding school during the week, and I can have some time with my youngest. I usually
1:01:11 lay in bed with him just before he falls asleep and we just kind of chat for 10 or 12 minutes.
1:01:18 If I can do those two things, then it was a good day. They make me feel like a good dad. It’s very
1:01:23 cathartic for me. I feel grounded. I like to know that they’re doing all right and they are doing all right.
1:01:28 But when I don’t see them or speak to them every day, my brain goes crazy. Are there something gone
1:01:34 wrong? Are they all right? My communication, this is sort of a corporate lesson. Communication is with
1:01:37 the listener. When you don’t communicate with your employees regularly, they will start communicating
1:01:42 with themselves and coming up with all sorts of crazy, batshit ideas or conspiracies for what’s
1:01:47 actually happening at the firm. You need to communicate consistently. And I find if I’m
1:01:52 not around my sons a lot and I’m not communicating with them a lot, that I start getting anxious
1:01:55 about things. So what I want you to do or what I would suggest you do is the following.
1:02:01 First, find out what is that one thing that every day makes it a good day for you? Is it going to
1:02:06 church? Is it working out? And just be cognizant of it. And also, also, it’s not a bad idea to say,
1:02:12 what one person in my life that I love immensely and know, I know loves me immensely. Does it make
1:02:16 sense to check in every day, whether it’s a text message, a FaceTime, or just to speak to them?
1:02:20 And does that give you comfort every day? What makes a great day for you?
1:02:27 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shallon. Drew Burrows is our
1:02:31 technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network.
1:02:36 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn.
1:02:42 And please follow our Prop G Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and
1:02:42 Thursday.
1:02:56 I’m good now. I don’t know if it’s the edibles I’m eating or the Xanax I had on the plane to get
1:03:00 over the jet lag. Daddy, daddy’s even angrier than usual.
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0:01:35 Episode 341.
0:01:38 341 is the area code covering California’s East Bay Area.
0:01:41 In 1941, Captain America debuted.
0:01:44 What’s the similarity between politicians and Marvel characters?
0:01:48 They’re now fighting amongst themselves to stay in business.
0:01:52 Go, go, go!
0:02:04 Welcome to the 341st episode of the Prop G-Pod.
0:02:04 I didn’t like that joke.
0:02:08 It was an attempt to be clever, but I didn’t think it was that funny.
0:02:10 I just, I gotta go back to the dick stuff.
0:02:12 Anyways, welcome to the pod.
0:02:12 What’s happening?
0:02:23 I’ve been to Tulum a bunch.
0:02:26 People say it’s really affected and overly expensive.
0:02:30 It’s basically kind of like granola, sort of four-star service, six-star prices.
0:02:33 Although, Mexico is absolutely my favorite place to vacation in the world.
0:02:34 I think it’s the best value.
0:02:42 And I do like the idea of being on the beach all day, pretending to be healthy so you can go out and abuse hallucinogens and listen to a DJ for, you know,
0:02:44 a $700 bottle of alcohol.
0:02:45 Yeah, that makes sense.
0:02:46 Namaste.
0:02:47 Namaste.
0:02:49 Anyways, I love it there.
0:02:51 This was a different type of trip.
0:02:51 It was a wedding.
0:02:58 It was a mix of fabulous and nice people who seemed to be really, I don’t know, into being together and celebrating people’s love.
0:03:00 Their love for one another.
0:03:02 Anyway, very much enjoyed it.
0:03:04 Back in the UK, it is a spectacular day.
0:03:06 Living in London is like living in San Francisco.
0:03:07 I used to live in San Francisco.
0:03:11 And the nine nights a year that you could actually dine outdoors, no one was ready for it, so we didn’t know what to do.
0:03:12 We were paralyzed.
0:03:14 And it is such a beautiful day here today.
0:03:16 I don’t know how to respond.
0:03:17 I don’t know if I should take a walk.
0:03:18 I don’t know if I should take my dogs out.
0:03:20 I just don’t know what to do.
0:03:24 I’m so flummoxed by this round, hot, yellow thing in the sky.
0:03:26 Anyways, need to get settled.
0:03:26 Need to get back in.
0:03:28 I slept for 11 hours last night.
0:03:29 I haven’t done that in a while.
0:03:30 I mean, crazy.
0:03:33 Just absolutely crazy.
0:03:48 So up today, speaking of London, speaking of London and Europe and Russia, we have Dr. Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings, chancellor of Durham University, and a former U.S. National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs.
0:03:54 We discussed with Dr. Earl Trump’s role in the Russia-Ukraine war, the future of U.S.-Russia relations, and the broader geopolitical effects of the conflict.
0:03:56 I learned a lot from this conversation.
0:04:00 It’s a complex situation, but she kind of breaks things down in a pretty sober way.
0:04:03 I enjoyed sort of the way she framed everything.
0:04:08 I also like the fact I couldn’t figure out her politics, which I always enjoy in someone we interview.
0:04:11 Moving on, some news in the higher ed space.
0:04:17 Harvard announced we’ll offer free tuition for families earning $200,000 a year or less.
0:04:23 Also starting this fall, undergraduate students from families making under $100,000 will receive full coverage for tuition, housing, and food.
0:04:28 Even those earning above that could qualify for some aid, depending on factors including debt and cost of living.
0:04:36 Harvard estimates that 86% of U.S. families could now qualify for some level of financial assistance under the new system.
0:04:39 So I think this is a really nice press release.
0:04:41 They’ll get a lot of nice accolades for it.
0:04:42 And let me be clear.
0:04:49 I think this is fucking bullshit and a total misdirect from what is the underlying corruption that plagues Harvard and every other higher education institution.
0:04:49 Let’s break this down.
0:04:52 It’s not about affordability.
0:04:53 As a matter of fact, this makes things worse.
0:04:56 And that is, if you hit the lottery and you’re one of two things,
0:05:03 you’re either the child of a rich person or you’re freakishly remarkable, then you get shot into outer space of prosperity at an unbelievable speed of light.
0:05:05 You don’t even have, you don’t have to take on student debt.
0:05:09 But what about the middle class kid who’s just good, not great, who’s not freakishly remarkable,
0:05:23 and whose father doesn’t know somebody who has their name on the side of a Harvard building that gets arbitraged down from an elite university to an okay university that doesn’t have the endowment of Harvard and ends up taking out huge student loans for a credential that’s not nearly as powerful.
0:05:29 Because fucking Harvard won’t do what it’s supposed to do and should do and expand its freshman class.
0:05:30 This isn’t about affordability.
0:05:35 The Ivy League has been affordable for a long time because they have so much goddamn money.
0:05:37 This is an issue of accessibility.
0:05:39 This isn’t about who gets in.
0:05:40 That’s another misdirect.
0:05:41 Oh, isn’t it great?
0:05:44 60% of Harvard’s freshman class is non-white.
0:05:49 But wait, 70% of those people come from dual-income homes in the upper quintile of income earning a household.
0:05:53 So letting in the dot of a private equity Taiwanese billionaire is not diversity.
0:06:01 And giving a little bit of money away to people who couldn’t afford it or, quite frankly, are the ones who could afford to take out student loans because they’re going to graduate from fucking Harvard.
0:06:08 An average salary of undergrads, I think about 120 grads, average salary of HBS grads is about a quarter of a million first year.
0:06:10 They can afford student loans.
0:06:17 The people who can afford student loans are the ones that get arbitraged to less than universities because fucking Harvard’s full of people like myself who are narcissists.
0:06:28 And through a mix of arrogance and self-aggrandizement, put out press releases talking about financial aid when they should be putting out press releases saying, I know, let’s let in more people than a good Starbucks serves on a Tuesday.
0:06:46 If you had a drug, a pill, that would make you less likely if you took this pill to be depressed, more likely to get married, more likely to end up in civil service, less likely to kill yourself, much less likely to kill others, much less likely to be depressed, end up incarcerated,
0:06:50 end up being a ward of the state, would you hoard that drug?
0:06:54 Would you say, sorry, sorry, we have tens of billions of dollars.
0:07:03 We could distribute this drug to not just 1,500 people, but to 15,000 with absolutely no sacrifice in the quality of the freshman class.
0:07:04 Oh, that would hurt the brand.
0:07:05 Bullshit.
0:07:08 When I got into UCLA, the admissions rate was 76%.
0:07:08 Now it’s 9%.
0:07:12 It wasn’t exactly a Joey Bag of Donuts brand back then.
0:07:17 Whether it’s owning a house or having a degree from an elite institution, this is what we’re going to do to you young people.
0:07:30 We’re going to come up with all sorts of virtue signaling and talk about research and talk about brand and essentially say, okay, if you’ve got a shit ton of money you get in, and if you’re freakishly remarkable, that’s the Vaseline we rub over the lens of this corruption.
0:07:33 It’s not about affordability, it’s about access.
0:07:49 And if these universities that have an endowment over a billion dollars don’t expand their freshman class faster than population growth, regardless of the bullshit press releases they put out around financial aid, which is literally the dandruff off their fucking sleeves that means nothing, then they should lose their tax-free status.
0:07:50 Because they’re no longer public servants.
0:07:52 They think they’re fucking Birkin bags.
0:07:54 That was a rant.
0:07:57 With that, here’s our conversation with Dr. Fiona Hill.
0:08:04 Dr. Hill, where does this podcast find you?
0:08:08 It finds me in my office at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
0:08:09 Good.
0:08:11 Let’s bust right into it.
0:08:13 We’re recording this on Tuesday.
0:08:18 Trump is speaking with Putin today, ostensibly, to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.
0:08:25 Give us what you believe is the state of play, what each party wants from this, and what you think the likely outcome will be.
0:08:35 Well, it’s actually a pretty complicated situation because we’re tending to see this in a bilateral sense between the U.S. and Russia, and also then with Russia and Ukraine.
0:08:42 President Trump has inserted himself into what he’s basically saying is a conflict with two sides, with Ukraine and Russia.
0:08:44 But it’s far beyond that.
0:08:56 Russia’s been supported certainly since well into the war in the first year in 2022 by an array of other countries and its ability to continue the fight with Ukraine.
0:09:01 It’s gone from being a special military operation to the largest land war in Europe since World War II.
0:09:05 China, North Korea, and Iran have come in on Russia’s side.
0:09:13 Initially, on the parts of Iran and North Korea, to provide Russia with all kinds of ammunition and drones that it didn’t actually have in its arsenal.
0:09:23 And China has facilitated the transfer of all kinds of other dual-use products, although it hasn’t actually actively supported Russia in the same way as Iran and North Korea.
0:09:28 There are North Korean troops fighting against Ukrainians on the Russian side.
0:09:31 And the Iranians have been building drone factories in Russia.
0:09:37 And I want to put that on the table because it just shows how complicated this whole situation is.
0:09:41 And on the part of Ukraine, obviously, Ukraine is a European country.
0:09:48 And this has really serious implications for all of Ukraine’s immediate neighbors, including the Baltic states and Poland,
0:09:56 because Belarus, which is another supposedly independent country which Russia is in a tight union-like arrangement with,
0:10:01 has been used as a launching pad for the war into Ukraine as well.
0:10:05 Belarus directly borders the Baltic states and also Poland.
0:10:10 And, of course, for Europe, this is an existential European security issue.
0:10:21 They’re under assault 24-7 from Russia one way or another, either by cyber attacks or critical national infrastructure attacks, poisonings, assassinations, all kinds of things, sabotage operations.
0:10:39 It’s just been announced in the last day or so, right ahead of these negotiations, that the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, are being held responsible for arson attacks at shopping centers in Poland and also in Lithuania, as well as other sabotage attacks at warehouses around Europe.
0:10:42 So, this is a very complicated situation.
0:10:45 Trump wants to get FaceTime with Putin.
0:10:49 I mean, we should already anticipate, I think, that he’s had a whole host of phone calls.
0:10:57 I find it hard to believe that Steve Whitcoff has been talking for hours with Putin without any other sets of interactions with President Trump in the meantime.
0:11:05 And, basically, what President Trump wants is Ukraine put to one side so that he can get on with having a big deal with Russia.
0:11:22 We’ve heard reports today coming out of Russia that there are plans for the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Russian Space Agency, and others to meet with Elon Musk to talk about space collaboration, including with Musk’s aim of getting to Mars.
0:11:30 I mean, remember, of course, that the Soviet Union and Russia were the countries that put the first satellite, the first dog, the first man, the first woman in space.
0:11:36 And, obviously, a personal dream of Musk, not just to access space, but also to get to Mars.
0:11:37 So, there’s a lot going on here.
0:11:46 And in the midst of all of this is Ukraine that was basically fighting for its survival, and Russia wants a maximalist approach still with Ukraine.
0:11:56 It’s been very apparent from all the statements coming out of Russia that Putin is not prepared at all to concede beyond the goals that he laid out at the beginning of this conflict,
0:12:02 which was taking control, one way or another, of key territories in Ukraine and having a say about where Ukraine goes in the future.
0:12:16 So, it feels to me like Putin and Trump are, to a certain extent, negotiating against themselves in the sense that without Ukraine or Europe at the table, they can agree to whatever they want.
0:12:24 It feels to me that they’re under the impression they get to decide what happens here without getting the OK from Europe, who’s been providing 60% of the funding,
0:12:30 or the people actually doing the fighting who would have to put down their weapons, which is the Ukrainian people and their army.
0:12:36 Isn’t this a bit of a, quite frankly, more symbolic than real in terms of what actually happens?
0:12:38 I’m completely with you, Scott.
0:12:39 I mean, it’s not naive at all.
0:12:45 And I think you’re just calling it like you see it, which I think is how most people see it, you know, including in Europe and in Ukraine.
0:12:48 President Trump was recently on Air Force One.
0:12:56 I think yesterday I was reading, you know, some reports where he was talking about how over the weekend he got it all worked out in Mar-a-Lago.
0:12:58 Well, who was he working it out with, his own team?
0:13:06 You know, there’s a lot of, you know, as you’re putting it here, negotiating with ourselves on the US side, or at least, you know, Trump and his immediate circle.
0:13:16 A lot of talking to Putin going on, Steve Wyckoff, you know, meeting with Putin for many hours and hearing Russia’s side of the argument here.
0:13:19 And then them going to Ukraine and putting a lot of pressure on Ukraine.
0:13:25 And as you’re also pointing out, the Europeans have had to basically go into a parallel negotiation channel.
0:13:35 I mean, it’s certainly the case that we’ve had President Macron of France, Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom, and others were trying to interact with President Trump on this.
0:13:44 But it really feels, in many respects, like they’re fighting, in some respects, a rearguard action diplomatically, trying to kind of figure out, you know, how on earth they salvage something from this.
0:13:51 It really smacks, not just of 19th century or early 20th century secret diplomacy, but frankly, of 18th century.
0:13:58 Trump is going to preside next year over the 250th anniversary of American independence, you know, the American Revolution.
0:14:06 And at that same time frame, if you kind of look back to that later part of the 18th century, there was all kinds of diplomacy going on in Europe over the heads of other countries.
0:14:09 There was the partition of Poland, you know, for example.
0:14:11 We’re in that kind of historic space.
0:14:18 And that’s, you know, something that most of us would never have anticipated, you know, given how far we’ve gone in this last 250 years.
0:14:25 But we seem to be just right back to that whole period where great powers just think that they can carve up the world and then make everybody else go along with it.
0:14:28 I always like to ask what could go right.
0:14:38 And let me outline a scenario and you tell me if you think there’s any veracity or likelihood or if I’m just, you know, there’s too many biases in my scenario here.
0:14:42 But the EU combined has an economy of $19 trillion.
0:14:44 You listed North Korea.
0:14:51 They’re basically, I mean, they have, they’re willing to send their kids into a meat grinder, but their economy is about, I think, about $30 billion.
0:14:53 Iran’s is $500 billion.
0:14:57 China, obviously, that’s a huge economic power.
0:15:04 But my sense is they actually have a vested interest in keeping this war going because they get to get oil on sale from Russia because no one will buy their oil.
0:15:14 If the EU gets its act together, coordinates their incredible military infrastructure, they have great military, great weapons manufacturers, they have incredible IP.
0:15:26 If they could find the resolve to coordinate and perhaps, you know, make the requisite commitment, take their defense spending from 1.9 to 3%, which they’ve stated, quite frankly, they don’t need the Americans.
0:15:37 Isn’t there a silver lining here that Europe can actually do what they did in 1939 and say, no, we’re not backing down to a murderous autocrat, regardless of whether the U.S. backs us or not?
0:15:44 Isn’t there an opportunity here for Europe to become a union and push back on their own with or without the U.S.’s help?
0:15:45 There absolutely is.
0:15:48 And I think we’re seeing some signs of this already.
0:15:55 There’s just a couple of issues that are probably, you know, quite significant obstacles right now, but it doesn’t mean to say that they can’t be overcome.
0:15:56 And I think you’ve laid it out perfectly.
0:16:02 And, you know, you didn’t also talk about the limited extent of the Russian economy.
0:16:06 And there’s a lot of talk about trades being restored between the U.S. and Russia.
0:16:14 But when we look back to the previous levels of trade, the volumes of trade between Russia and the United States, it was the same level as the U.S. and Costa Rica.
0:16:19 So it just reinforces the point that you’ve made and you’ve laid out there, you know, very succinctly.
0:16:32 The obstacles are really that we’re seeing in aggregate a lot of the efforts being taken by the European Union to basically put money on the table for reinvigorating the defence and manufacturing sector of Europe.
0:16:35 And of course, not all of the key countries are members of the EU.
0:16:44 The UK famously took itself out with Brexit and that’s obviously the UK revitalising its manufacturing sector will be pretty critical here.
0:16:47 You’ve got Norway, which, of course, has a major sovereign wealth fund.
0:16:56 And as you’ve pointed out, is also a major arms and manufacturing power, obviously not to the kind of scale of others, but it’s pretty significant.
0:17:05 You’ve also got Turkey, which is a NATO member and has a really serious manufacturing capacity and also pretty serious military capabilities as well.
0:17:13 And Switzerland, which is in obviously a strange position debating its own neutrality, but also has a lot of capacity in manufacturing, including in the weapons sphere.
0:17:16 So absolutely, there is an opportunity there.
0:17:24 The obstacles is getting past these seeming constraints of who’s in what and actually agreeing to work on this together.
0:17:32 I think we’re seeing signs of that because you are seeing all kinds of different meetings going on, all kinds of agreements of pooling funds and pooling some of this manufacturing capability.
0:17:45 But the second obstacle is really speed because, you know, the US is barreling along on this path or Trump is barreling along on this path towards a ceasefire and is also cutting relationships with Europeans at the same time.
0:17:47 These tariffs are essentially a sanction on your allies.
0:18:00 And if you’re imposing tariffs on the EU and on other European countries that might not be part of the EU, but a part of NATO, you’re making hostile claims against your NATO allies, including Denmark over Greenland.
0:18:04 Remember, Greenland is actually a member of NATO through its association with Denmark.
0:18:08 You’re menacing Canada and imposing enormous tariffs on Canada.
0:18:12 And remember, Canada is also a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
0:18:18 You’re actually also then hobbling, you know, your allies at a time when they actually do have this opportunity to stand up.
0:18:38 So I think that, you know, what we’re going to have to see is European countries and Canada, which is part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, really push back and get together and figure out ways in which they can actively cooperate on the military defense sector, as well as, as you’re suggesting, diversifying away from their reliance on the United States.
0:18:39 It’s long overdue, frankly.
0:18:41 I mean, they should have been doing this decades ago.
0:18:54 It strikes me that a lot of this comes down to resources or money and who’s going to foot the bill to continue the fight, if you will, or at least put us in a stronger position such that we can negotiate from a position of strength.
0:19:04 And it also strikes me that the most obvious and simplest means of funding the war for another two years is to seize Russian assets.
0:19:08 We have somewhere between $200 and $300 billion in Brussels.
0:19:16 And the fear is that people don’t want to do business with Russia or, excuse me, with the EU if they’re worried that geopolitically their assets can be seized.
0:19:27 I would argue that that incentive or disincentive to work with Europe is vastly dwarfed by the disincentive we should put in place not to invade your neighbor.
0:19:34 Your thoughts on seizing $200 to $300 billion in Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s fight?
0:19:39 There’s no question that this is the way that Europe should go.
0:19:50 I mean, a lot of the debate before was if the US, this is here, of course, in the United States, was that this could be, you know, very detrimental to trust in the US economy, in US financial markets, in the Treasury.
0:20:02 I mean, if we go back to Trump 1.0, for example, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin was always extraordinarily concerned about the impact on the dollar and the dollar’s future as the reserve currency and the global currency.
0:20:08 There was too much emphasis all the time on the punitive side of financial sanctions.
0:20:30 Well, look, I mean, the United States, I think, is raising all of those questions, irrespective of all of that, again, by the tariffs, which is, again, sanctioning your allies, adding a value-added tax onto every particular product here, and just the kind of chaotic nature in which all of this is being played out, as well as the hostile rhetoric towards the allies.
0:20:39 So, at this particular stage, if there’d been any qualms on the European side that were basically being transmitted from the US, those should have gone.
0:20:47 And as Europe is now confronting the fact, as you’ve laid out very clearly here, that it’s pretty much going to be on its own in sort of dealing with the aftermath.
0:20:52 Because what Trump seems to suggest is, I’m going to give you a ceasefire and then I’m going to cut and run.
0:21:05 But, you know, we’re already, today as we’re recording this, looking at the breakdown of the ceasefire in Gaza, which Trump has made, you know, a lot of noise about and, you know, kind of basically put into place with greater claim.
0:21:10 That’s being basically pushed back on by Israel at this particular juncture.
0:21:16 So, we can’t really expect that a ceasefire or a truce is going to hold for any particular length of time.
0:21:18 The Russians are most likely to drag off the negotiations.
0:21:31 They’re likely to, you know, perhaps even agree to something, but again, with all of these preconditions and immediately, you know, look for some pretext to violate it again and put the blame on Europe or on the Ukrainians or both.
0:21:42 Which will put Europe in a very tricky position, where they’re going to basically need to move with speed, with real speed, to build up the defensive capacity.
0:21:55 And that is going to put the onus right back on the frozen assets, as you have suggested, along with basically the aggregate of their own capacities, which is, again, as you’ve said, pretty significant.
0:21:59 We’ll be right back.
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0:24:46 You listed China in the same group as Iran and North Korea in terms of their support of Russia.
0:24:53 And my impression, it might be the wrong impression, is that China wants to stay on good terms mostly with everybody.
0:25:00 And they’re being polite, maybe even supportive of Russia, but don’t want to alienate the rest of the world.
0:25:12 I mean, China, my sense is if China weighed in kind of feet first behind Russia in this conflict, it would be really, really meaningful.
0:25:17 Describe or give us some nuance to what you meant by the Chinese support of Russia in this conflict.
0:25:23 Yeah, I did say that it wasn’t the same as North Korea and Iran in terms of supplying weapons.
0:25:35 And frankly, there was other countries like India that have been sending, you know, kind of weapons to Russia because they have also very tight relationships with Russia on the arms sales side.
0:25:39 India traditionally got all of its weapons from the Soviet Union and also from Russia.
0:25:44 But India hasn’t rhetorically, you know, come out in support of Russia in the way that China has.
0:25:49 President Xi and President Putin have very close personal relationships.
0:25:54 You can’t basically underscore enough about how close that personal relationship is.
0:25:59 They have the same rough birth date, the same outlook on the world.
0:26:03 They’ve met each other more times than any other, you know, set of leaders.
0:26:23 And if you recall, just before Russia’s launch of its invasion of Ukraine, there was the meeting on the sidelines of the Beijing Olympics between the Winter Olympics, that is, between Putin and Xi, in which they declared basically a strategic bilateral relationship, a partnership without limits.
0:26:32 Now, the Chinese have been quick to try to point out that they didn’t realize that Putin was essentially going to move into Ukraine quite so soon afterwards.
0:26:38 I think there’s a lot of regret that, you know, a bit of buyer’s remorse there that they made this statement.
0:26:41 And then that was so soon on the heels of this invasion.
0:26:47 Of course, if it had turned out differently, it was indeed a special military operation, not this largest land war in Europe since World War II.
0:26:51 You know, China might have felt a little bit more sanguine about this.
0:26:59 But nonetheless, all the way through, the Chinese have made it very clear to Ukrainians and others that they do not want to see Russia lose.
0:27:05 Now, ironically, China was also the largest investor in Ukraine as a single country before the war.
0:27:06 They have no beef with Ukraine.
0:27:08 They’ve made that very clear to the Ukrainians.
0:27:09 They’ve also said this to the Europeans.
0:27:12 They see this as a proxy war against the United States.
0:27:15 And so they don’t want to see Russia lose.
0:27:19 Now, the interesting factor is that the United States is pulling out of this.
0:27:21 Trump has also recognized this.
0:27:23 He said that, you know, he never wanted to be part of this.
0:27:25 They’ve recently started to say this.
0:27:31 Now, the United States was never actually embarking on a proxy war against Russia.
0:27:39 Like Europeans, they were trying to basically help Ukraine defend itself, which Ukraine has every right to under the terms of the UN Charter.
0:27:45 And of course, it’s very similar to Kuwait, you know, back in the day and to other countries that have been invaded by a much larger neighbor.
0:28:01 But for China, basically, the failure of Putin to prevail in Ukraine would be very symbolic then of a mistake that would have been made by Xi in backing Putin as his horse in this race.
0:28:18 And so the Chinese have been saying to the Europeans, and I was at the Munich Security Conference in February, you know, through the infamous J.D. Vance speech there, but where the Europeans were hearing from the Chinese, a lot of pleasure, frankly, about the rift between Europe and the United States.
0:28:23 And China is saying to Europe, look, there was nothing personal in our support of Russia here.
0:28:24 I’m sure you understand our position.
0:28:27 And we’re going to be there for you, you know, when this war ends.
0:28:29 We’re going to help in terms of construction and investment.
0:28:37 You know, there’s been a great deal of desire on the Chinese part to pull away European countries from the United States.
0:28:39 But I think they’ve got a fundamental misreading of the situation.
0:28:43 In fact, they’re aiding and abetting this major war in Europe.
0:28:46 And in World War II, China was on the other side of the ledger, right?
0:28:48 I mean, China was part of the Allied powers.
0:28:53 Of course, that was in its war with Japan after all the Japanese invasions of China.
0:29:01 But this time, for the first time in history, China is on the wrong side from the European perspective of a major land war in Europe.
0:29:13 And again, even if it isn’t to the same extent as North Korea and Iran, China has been putting all of its focus on making sure that Putin and Russia are propped up and that they don’t fail in this endeavour.
0:29:14 And really, what is this endeavour?
0:29:18 It’s a slice and dice Ukraine and to dominate Europe.
0:29:31 So loosely, kind of a crude overview is that the world is bifurcating and it’s sort of the US and Europe and some of democracies globally, whether it’s Japan or Australia.
0:29:40 And then there’s Russia, Iran, North Korea, and to a certain extent, China.
0:29:41 And there’s some nuance there.
0:29:58 But just as the swing voter is the most important voter in the US, that small group of people that swing elections one way or the other, it feels as if this new swing voters in terms of size of economy and playing both sides a little bit are India and the kingdom.
0:30:04 And it sounds like you’re saying India, if you had to tilt them towards one side, it’s towards Russia.
0:30:08 One, I just want to confirm that that thesis is correct.
0:30:12 And two, I’m curious what the kingdom’s role in all of this is.
0:30:14 I think that’s a great observation, Scott.
0:30:15 And I’d just like to be a little clearer about India.
0:30:22 I don’t think they’re really tilted towards Russia in so much as that was the original relationship.
0:30:27 India and the Soviet Union, you know, had this very close relationship for decades.
0:30:29 And India was, of course, always unaligned.
0:30:31 And India just doesn’t want to choose sides.
0:30:36 And, of course, you know, where there’s an option for, you know, expanding some of the relationships, some of the arms sales.
0:30:40 I mean, the US didn’t kind of come through, you know, particularly quickly on offering an alternative.
0:30:48 And remember, of course, that India always feels itself in a standoff also with Pakistan, but very importantly with China.
0:30:53 We’ve had a real hot conflict on the border between China and India in the Himalayas.
0:30:58 That’s a hot dispute all the time where, you know, soldiers have died on the Indian side.
0:31:03 And India has always been wanting to try to see if it could indeed pull Russia away from China.
0:31:13 I think India has kind of given up on that idea, but it never quite basically gives up the ghost, but understands it has to keep this relationship with Russia.
0:31:16 India also wants to have a relationship with the United States.
0:31:28 It also, just to underscore, has deep interests in Europe, especially in the other kingdom, the United Kingdom, where you’ve got a kind of a reversal of the old colonial relationship.
0:31:31 India is a major investor in India.
0:31:39 There are, of course, very prominent Anglo-Indian populations, most notably Rishi Sunak, a former UK prime minister.
0:31:42 India has been heavily invested in steel and manufacturing.
0:31:53 India is also heavily invested in global education, has been building universities and all kinds of relationships with UK and other educational sectors.
0:31:54 So India is complex.
0:31:56 India doesn’t want to have to choose.
0:32:02 It wants to basically chart its own course, which, you know, fits back to the old role in the unaligned movement.
0:32:07 But as you know, you’re saying they’re very much a swing voter and a lot of complexity there.
0:32:13 In terms of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I think it’s absolutely fascinating that the role that they’re likely to play.
0:32:16 I’ve had a number of conversations with them in other settings as well.
0:32:17 It’s not just about Russia.
0:32:21 It’s not just about what’s happening with Iran in the region.
0:32:23 It’s not just about the United States either.
0:32:30 You’ve got to remember that also the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom have very close relationships.
0:32:33 Lots of investment by the Saudis in the UK.
0:32:43 And as the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund diversifies its activity, you know, in many respects, they’re going to be the financiers of lots of global projects.
0:32:57 I kept thinking as I was kind of listening to some of the things that the Saudis were saying, it’s almost like the Rothschilds of another century in terms of being the bankers, you know, to the world, not just to Europe and the crown heads of Europe with the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund.
0:33:04 They’re heavily thinking about what does Saudi Arabia become and what do they do beyond oil and gas?
0:33:06 So there’s a lot to look into there.
0:33:09 But beyond that, there’s Brazil, there’s South Africa.
0:33:16 I mean, Turkey is a kind of swing voter in the European and, you know, kind of broader Middle Eastern perspective.
0:33:25 We’ve seen Israel, you know, driving its own future and not being aligned with the United States on every front by any stretch of the imagination.
0:33:35 So, look, I think we’ve got a world here where there’s a lot of other powers, regional powers and some with global impacts who do not want to have to make a choice here.
0:33:40 They don’t want to be caught between the Russia or the United States and anywhere the United States seems to be coming over to the Russian perspective.
0:33:47 And they certainly don’t want to be a part of a world in which the United States, China and perhaps Russia are carving things up for themselves.
0:33:51 And within that, I mean, Europe gets back to where you started with.
0:34:07 Europe itself, in its various different connotations of EU, European members of NATO, if they start to, you know, set up their own sub-NATO regional alliances, could all play swing roles in all of these issues.
0:34:14 So this is not a world dominated just by great powers in the old 18th, 19th or 20th century.
0:34:17 The 21st century is a much more complex and messy place.
0:34:25 So, you’ve worked on Russia policy across three different administrations, Bush, Obama, and Trump.
0:34:29 So I want to ask a more basic question.
0:34:37 And that is, it is difficult for a lot of us to understand the endgame here and the strategy behind what Trump’s approach to Ukraine.
0:34:41 It feels as if he started the negotiation with Russia by folding.
0:34:42 Like, okay, you can have everything.
0:34:44 Now let’s start the negotiation.
0:34:56 And from someone such as myself, who I think has a bias against Trump, it feels to me like Putin has agreed to buy billions of dollars of Trump coin.
0:35:04 And that in exchange, they’ve decided they’re going to have two spheres of influence between two autocrats and carve up the world for their own financial benefit.
0:35:13 Steel man, a more logical explanation of the current complexion of Trump as it relates to Ukraine.
0:35:16 In sum, what are they thinking?
0:35:17 What is the endgame?
0:35:20 Well, look, this isn’t about America, Scott.
0:35:20 Let’s be frank.
0:35:25 And, you know, if I really kind of think about it, I mean, you cover this a lot on your podcast.
0:35:26 It’s the kind of thing that I also look at.
0:35:30 This whole de-industrialization of the United States.
0:35:35 I wrote a book a few years ago about this in the United States, Russia, and, you know, UK context.
0:35:41 There’s a whole host of issues that have been decades in the making that need to be addressed.
0:35:46 And this isn’t one way of doing them, you know, basically a convergence between Russia and the United States.
0:35:49 It’s a convergence of autocratic thinking, to be honest.
0:35:53 I mean, we’re talking about the very top of our economic pyramid here.
0:35:58 And it’s really driven in a large part by Trump and his own worldview.
0:36:00 And I’ll get to that in a second, but also by people like Elon Musk.
0:36:06 I mean, Musk has a vested interest, I mentioned this earlier, in basically engaging directly with Russia.
0:36:08 And I think he’s been a big driver of this as well.
0:36:13 In part, it’s for Starlink and for the relay stations, the terrestrial relay stations.
0:36:14 He needs to have global coverage.
0:36:19 Russia is the largest territory in the world, you know, along with China and then, you know, Iran,
0:36:22 as well as the United States, Canada, all these giant countries.
0:36:27 You know, he needs to have those within his frame for his business to succeed.
0:36:29 And look at SpaceX.
0:36:37 It developed using, you know, the first rocketry and all of the systems developed first in the Soviet Union and Russia.
0:36:44 The first inventor of the rocket ship was a Russian scientist, an autodidact, very similar to Musk, frankly,
0:36:47 you know, back at the period before the Russian Revolution.
0:36:51 So the Soviet Union and Russia have been the pioneers in space.
0:36:59 And as I said, there’s now discussions going on about how to work for Musk with the Russian Space Agency,
0:37:02 the Russian Atomic Agency, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
0:37:04 So there’s that.
0:37:08 And then there’s also this great desire that Trump has had since the 1980s of doing business with the Soviet Union
0:37:13 and with Russia on a whole host of different fronts from his family perspective.
0:37:15 And that’s definitely out there.
0:37:19 And you mentioned cryptocurrency and all the other kinds of issues that are out there on the table.
0:37:22 So that’s a major part of this.
0:37:23 Of course, it is.
0:37:25 And it’s autocrat to autocrat, oligarch to oligarch.
0:37:27 You know, very similar sort of setup here.
0:37:31 It’s got nothing to do with Americans, particularly given back, as we said before,
0:37:35 about the paucity of the trade relationship between Russia and the United States in the past.
0:37:38 But it could be very significant in this few set of areas.
0:37:42 But the other thing is, and Trump is genuine about this,
0:37:49 he is extraordinarily concerned about the risk of World War III, nuclear Armageddon,
0:37:57 and, you know, the real risks that are still prevalent in the tense relationship between the United States and Russia
0:37:59 as it comes to nuclear weapons.
0:38:02 Next year is the end, the formal end of New START,
0:38:08 the Brahms Regulation Treaty that was first put into play in 2010,
0:38:13 the Biden administration extended it, but it expires now in 2026.
0:38:15 This is the year that you would have to negotiate something.
0:38:20 And Trump always has a fixation on nuclear weapons.
0:38:22 I think he’s a nuclear zero guy.
0:38:23 I’ve talked about this in, you know, other settings.
0:38:28 He would like to see, basically, a process in which he works with Putin
0:38:31 to lead towards a major arms reduction.
0:38:34 So the Super Trump Arms Regulation Treaty for a new start.
0:38:40 He wanted to do that in Trump 1.0, but it all got lost in the whole mix of the Mueller reports
0:38:46 and investigations and all of the drama about Russian interference in the 2016 and, you know,
0:38:50 2017 election and first parts of Trump’s presidency.
0:38:52 He could never get, you know, to that stage.
0:39:00 The Helsinki infamous meeting between Trump and Putin was supposed to start those strategic nuclear discussions.
0:39:05 That was basically the whole frame for those meetings in Helsinki,
0:39:12 just as Gorbachev and Reagan and Reagan and H.W. Bush had met in places like Helsinki and Reykjavik and Geneva in the past.
0:39:17 Trump has said multiple times that he wants to get back to this and he wants to get Ukraine out of the way.
0:39:22 He basically believes, when he said to Zelensky in the Oval Office, when you’re gambling with World War III,
0:39:27 that the real risk from his perspective, if it’s Ukraine dragging everybody into a conflict,
0:39:33 when he actually wants to get this gone off the page, he doesn’t like the slaughter of people either.
0:39:34 He’s genuine about that.
0:39:38 He really just doesn’t understand that for Putin, this is a price he’s willing to bear.
0:39:41 And for Ukraine, obviously, it’s a fight for their survival.
0:39:45 So, of course, you know, they’ve been engaged in this horrible fight.
0:39:47 But for Trump, this is just incomprehensible.
0:39:50 He wants it gone and he wants to sit down with Putin on nuclear weapons.
0:39:54 The problem with this thinking, of course, is that Ukraine was once a nuclear power.
0:40:00 It was part of the Soviet Union and it inherited, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, a strategic nuclear arsenal.
0:40:05 Admittedly, it didn’t inherit the command and control aspects of this, but it did have the weapons.
0:40:06 It had leverage.
0:40:13 And in 1990s, we pushed the United States and the UK as another nuclear power, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan,
0:40:16 to return those weapons or send those weapons.
0:40:21 It weren’t really turning them because they were on their soil to Russia for dismantling.
0:40:27 So after that, we gave promises and assurances to Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan that nothing bad would happen to them.
0:40:30 The UK signed that along with the United States and Russia.
0:40:31 And only the UK has taken that seriously.
0:40:34 Those assurances and guarantees.
0:40:38 And what this means is that Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons.
0:40:39 And what happened?
0:40:40 It got trashed.
0:40:43 Similar thing happened to Mama Gaddafi in Libya.
0:40:46 He was persuaded to give up nuclear weapons.
0:40:46 And what happened?
0:40:52 He got shot in a pipe, basically, you know, kidnapped and taken in by his rebels and his whole system
0:40:53 collapsed.
0:40:58 So this is a signal to the rest of the world, to the Indias, the Pakistans, the South Africans,
0:41:04 the Israels, all of the countries like Iran and North Korea that have been thinking about
0:41:11 or pursuing nuclear weapons, the Japans, the South Koreans, Taiwan and other European players,
0:41:15 that if you don’t have a nuclear weapon and you don’t have a guarantee by a nuclear power,
0:41:16 you’re in big trouble.
0:41:18 That’s the lesson of this.
0:41:23 And what’s more likely to happen than Trump being able to sit down with Putin and then
0:41:28 perhaps later with Xi, and he’s already made approaches to, obviously, North Korea in his
0:41:33 previous administration and now again to Iran for nuclear talks, is that you’re going to
0:41:37 end up instead of disarmament, but with more proliferation.
0:41:42 Because the message is that the United States doesn’t live up to its guarantees and its promises.
0:41:47 And why should the United States then be trusted as the nuclear guarantor for all of these
0:41:52 other countries that fall under it by treaty alliances, or the likelihood that they could
0:41:55 turn to the United States when they’re under duress?
0:41:57 So this is a huge problem.
0:42:02 It’s one of the key issues that is underappreciated about Trump.
0:42:03 He’s serious about this.
0:42:08 And I think to his credit, he’s serious about wanting to stop, as he puts it, the sense of
0:42:10 slaughter of young men at the front.
0:42:13 But he’s not really fully appreciating the dynamic.
0:42:15 Putin doesn’t care about all this death and destruction.
0:42:19 And also, why now would Putin give up the nuclear arsenal?
0:42:26 Because for Russia, that’s the ultimate guarantor and guarantee of its prowess on the battlefield,
0:42:32 its ability to force Ukraine to capitulate, and also its ability to deter Europe, the United
0:42:34 States and all these other countries.
0:42:38 And Putin has lowered the threshold for at least rhetorically talking about using nuclear weapons,
0:42:42 because he’s threatened, basically, to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainians when
0:42:45 he was losing on the battlefield in 2022.
0:42:48 So this is a really intensely difficult situation.
0:42:54 And although I think Trump is very sincere, I don’t think he’s fully grasping the implications
0:42:56 of some of the things that he’s done and said.
0:42:58 How do you think this plays out?
0:43:04 Many of us are just befuddled trying to figure out the incentive structure here, trying to figure
0:43:12 out geopolitically if Europe steps up the resolve of Russia, whether the US is in, out, in, out
0:43:15 regarding funding, intelligence, sanctions.
0:43:22 If you were trying to do scenario planning here, maybe it’s unfair to limit you to one outcome.
0:43:27 What do you think are the most likely scenarios for how this plays out through the rest of
0:43:28 25 and into 26?
0:43:33 Well, it is difficult because we’re not talking really about the United States, let’s be frank.
0:43:36 We’re talking about one guy and a group of people around him.
0:43:38 I mean, that is, you know, kind of unprecedented.
0:43:39 We’re talking about Trump.
0:43:44 Because I think for Putin, and sometimes I mix the two up myself, you know, because there’s
0:43:49 a very similar, you know, outlook and, you know, often sometimes game plan.
0:43:54 But there’s, and also in terms of, you know, the unchecked nature of their power.
0:44:00 But there’s a couple of very specific differences between the two, which are very important in
0:44:01 thinking about how this plays out.
0:44:04 First of all, Putin’s been in power for 25 years.
0:44:09 And the people around him, the people who’ve been around him for decades, they know their stuff.
0:44:11 They have a proper plan.
0:44:18 Basically, Putin wants to dominate again the regions that were formerly part of the Russian
0:44:20 Empire, formerly part of the Soviet Union, one way or another.
0:44:23 Doesn’t mean he’s going to send in tanks, you know, here, there and everywhere.
0:44:27 But he wants the veto on what they do, what they say, where they go.
0:44:30 And he certainly doesn’t want them to have any other options.
0:44:35 And he’s absolutely hell-bent, you know, on basically preventing the Europeans from getting
0:44:36 their act together as well.
0:44:39 There’s all these acts of sabotage, and I said, and psychological operations.
0:44:42 There’s an interference going on there all the time as well.
0:44:47 Now, Trump also doesn’t want Europe to get their act together, but, you know, for all kinds
0:44:47 of different reasons.
0:44:51 I mean, actually, Trump and Putin both don’t want to see NATO continue.
0:44:55 Trump thinks it’s because Europe rips him off, or rips the US off.
0:44:59 And he’s not wrong that Europe should have been doing a heck of a lot more for a lot longer
0:45:00 time about its own security.
0:45:05 And they should have got this message decades ago, not even just when Obama made the points
0:45:08 in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.
0:45:15 But there’s been every conceivable US administration going back to the 1960s and to Kennedy.
0:45:18 There’s been actually saying to Europe, come on, come on, you know, get going.
0:45:21 This is not just all reliance on the US time.
0:45:25 And that’s beyond, obviously, the strategic nuclear umbrella, but in terms of building
0:45:29 up and taking up more responsibility for their security.
0:45:33 Now, of course, Europe thought after 1989, this is great, peace, dividend, we can just
0:45:34 kind of move on and do other things.
0:45:38 But, you know, that message has still been coming through loud and clear.
0:45:41 So, actually, Trump now is basically saying the Europeans are right, you’re on your own.
0:45:43 That’s catnip for Putin.
0:45:44 That’s fantastic.
0:45:49 You know, the fact that Trump’s basically saying we’re not going to give Article 5 guarantees
0:45:51 to Europe unless it’s Article 5%.
0:45:56 They have to be paying 5% of their GDP, you know, and otherwise, you know, we might not
0:46:01 even contemplate supporting them under extreme circumstance.
0:46:03 That’s another thing that Putin’s been looking for.
0:46:08 So, I mean, basically, what I’m trying to say here is what it’s more likely to be is that
0:46:13 the United States is going to be supporting the Russian position because there’s so many
0:46:17 things that, you know, Trump actually also sees eye to eye with Putin on.
0:46:21 But we’re going to end up in an extraordinarily messy situation.
0:46:22 That’s really what I foresee.
0:46:23 I foresee my crystal ball.
0:46:24 It’s very cloudy.
0:46:28 There’s all kinds of, you know, things going on, you know, all over the place.
0:46:33 And in part, that comes down to the other big difference between Trump and Putin is Trump
0:46:34 is a totally one-man show.
0:46:36 He’s destroying the state.
0:46:42 He’s not acting with Congress and with the Senate, unless they’re like rubber stamps,
0:46:46 which actually for Putin also, the Russian doom and the Russian parliament is also a rubber
0:46:46 stamp.
0:46:48 But Putin operates within the state.
0:46:50 He’s a creature of the deep state.
0:46:52 He’s not dismantling the Russian state.
0:46:56 That was already dismantled, you know, under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin from the
0:46:57 Soviet and Russian times.
0:46:59 You know, the Russians have moved on beyond that.
0:47:07 He works through his state negotiators, Lavrov, the foreign minister, you know, for example,
0:47:10 his advisors, Ushakov, as well as through oligarchs and business people.
0:47:12 They all work for him.
0:47:15 And they’re all one very tight team.
0:47:18 For Trump, he doesn’t really pay any attention to any of the people around him.
0:47:21 He uses them as emissaries and envoys, but he doesn’t do his homework.
0:47:23 They can’t actually advise him on anything.
0:47:25 They just kind of come back.
0:47:27 God knows what kind of conversations they have.
0:47:28 Do they have notes?
0:47:30 Do they fully understand, you know, what they’ve heard?
0:47:32 And that makes Trump very unpredictable.
0:47:37 So I think if Putin’s looking at his own crystal ball, he also can’t say where this is going
0:47:37 to go.
0:47:41 He’s going to have to be constantly on the ball, not just the crystal ball, but on the other
0:47:44 ball, you know, trying to kind of figure out how he can push Trump in his direction.
0:47:50 And so things will change very dramatically if others push back, if the Europeans push
0:47:55 back, for example, or if any part of the US firmament pushes back as well.
0:48:00 If Congress, you know, suddenly realise that they’re a co-equal branch of government and
0:48:02 have their own powers, or if the Senate do.
0:48:05 So there’s all kinds of different constraints there.
0:48:11 And in Trump 1.0, Putin was very frustrated because he thought that Trump would already do
0:48:15 a lot of the things he’s already doing now, but there were all kinds of constraints.
0:48:17 So unfortunately, what I foresee here is a mess.
0:48:22 I could actually see that there could be a truce, there could be a ceasefire, but then
0:48:27 it’s when all of these other externalities, all of these other independent variables come
0:48:28 into play.
0:48:33 So, you know, I fear that we’re going to be in this very messy situation for some time,
0:48:40 but gets back to what you said again, there could be a more positive outcome if the Europeans
0:48:42 move very quickly to get their act together.
0:48:46 And there are signs of that, but they’ve got to have the political will.
0:48:52 And they’ve also got to realise that they can’t depend on the United States, and that they
0:48:55 also have to kind of come up with some kind of solution there.
0:49:00 So, I mean, maybe we should revert back onto this, you know, in a kind of a few weeks, also
0:49:02 to see where we are, because the situation is incredibly fluid.
0:49:05 We’ll be right back.
0:49:19 We’re back with more from Dr. Fiona Hill.
0:49:23 So I want to transition.
0:49:28 You’re the Chancellor of Durham University, one of the UK’s top institutions, and I would
0:49:31 just love to get, but you’re also very familiar with the US.
0:49:36 And the US does a small number of things really, really well.
0:49:37 We’re great with technology and software.
0:49:38 We’re great at media.
0:49:40 We make the best weapons in the world.
0:49:45 And I would argue that on a balanced scorecard, we dominate higher education, which isn’t to
0:49:51 say there aren’t other pockets of outstanding higher ed, including in the UK, but as the
0:49:56 leader of a UK higher ed institution, how would you compare and contrast higher education in
0:49:59 the UK versus the US, and what can we learn from each other?
0:50:03 Well, there’s a lot of interesting lessons there, and I know, Scott, that you pay a lot
0:50:04 of attention to this.
0:50:07 So I actually also, I’m on the board of overseers of Harvard.
0:50:10 I was elected to that just a couple of years ago.
0:50:14 And of course, I came to the United States, as many people did, to study.
0:50:19 I came in 1989, and I came because there was much more opportunity in the US system.
0:50:21 I had a full scholarship from Harvard.
0:50:22 You know, my father was a coal miner.
0:50:28 There was, you know, no real opportunities for education for his generation.
0:50:33 And, you know, my generation was lucky that, you know, I had a reasonably good level of elementary
0:50:34 schooling.
0:50:37 My secondary school wasn’t great, but there was this opportunity for scholarships.
0:50:42 I went to university in the UK to St. Andrews, basically funded by my local education authority.
0:50:47 But the real step up, as you’re basically hinting at here, was when I came to Harvard.
0:50:49 I was blown away by the resources.
0:50:53 You know, of course, I studied history and Russian and, you know, all the things that I’m
0:50:54 using today.
0:50:56 And there was that aspect also.
0:51:02 The founding of the Russian Research Centre, other regional studies centres, the massive investment
0:51:04 in language study history.
0:51:10 I studied with Richard Pipes, one of the greatest, you know, figures in Russian history, for example,
0:51:12 is one of his last graduate students.
0:51:18 All of that was greatly admired around the world, as well as all of the scientific research,
0:51:22 biosciences that has been started off by the US.
0:51:26 Of course, that was one of the secrets of the United States success after World War II, was
0:51:30 this massive investment in education and in research.
0:51:35 And the difference with the UK, which is the closest proximate to the United States, is it’s
0:51:36 all the public sector.
0:51:40 So the role that I have at Durham as the Chancellor is more as an ambassador.
0:51:43 I have a non-fiduciary, you know, role at the institution.
0:51:51 The 140 plus UK universities are almost all the basically public, publicly funded by the
0:51:55 government, which, of course, has all kinds of constraints on this, because it’s very
0:51:59 difficult for them to build up the kind of private endowment and investments that you
0:52:00 see in the US.
0:52:02 Only a few universities have managed to do that.
0:52:06 Oxford and Cambridge, most notably to some degree, St. Andrews, where I was a undergraduate
0:52:07 and also Durham.
0:52:10 But, you know, these are really small in comparison.
0:52:16 And they are very dependent also on student fees, which are capped, and, you know, also,
0:52:18 you know, kind of on international students.
0:52:23 And they don’t have the research capacity that the US does.
0:52:27 And there’s one thing that I think most people in the United States are completely unaware of,
0:52:35 is that the United Kingdom, through its UK research and innovation funds, and Germany and many
0:52:38 other countries invest heavily in US higher education.
0:52:43 They’re also, for the big universities like Harvard, are on bond markets and on the international
0:52:46 markets as investment opportunities.
0:52:49 And all of this is going to take an enormous hit.
0:52:55 You know, some of this freezing of grants and, you know, funding that we’ve already seen through
0:52:56 NIH, etc.
0:53:02 There’s also matching funding from Germany, from the UK and, you know, from other countries.
0:53:05 Huge investments in the US higher education.
0:53:11 Also, students, you know, all of this movement now to expel students who own visas and green
0:53:16 card holders, you know, irrespective of, you know, the circumstances around this is going
0:53:17 to have a huge chilling effect.
0:53:23 The cutting of NIH grants, the cutting of USAID, you know, the federal funding, looking at what’s
0:53:29 just happened to Johns Hopkins, you know, for example, 800 million of money earner that’s
0:53:31 gone from USAID that was on global public health.
0:53:35 I mean, again, these are all areas that other countries were heavily invested in.
0:53:39 So I actually think that, you know, what’s happening right now is the killing of the golden
0:53:39 goose.
0:53:44 Because another thing that I know from the US and the UK perspective is that universities are
0:53:47 anchor institutions in the regions.
0:53:54 And it’s not just private Ivy League universities that are key in the United States.
0:53:59 It’s obviously the public and land grant universities, which were set up in the 1860s to the 1890s.
0:54:05 Other intermediate universities, community colleges, they all have a huge impact in terms of the
0:54:08 revenue that they generate and in terms of the jobs and employment.
0:54:12 In the UK context, for example, in the northeast of England, which is one of the poorest regions
0:54:21 in Europe, let alone in the UK, 2.2 billion annually is generated just by the cluster of
0:54:24 universities there, including Durham, which is the largest of the research universities.
0:54:29 You know, in terms of the United Kingdom at large, you know, there’s something almost at
0:54:36 800,000 jobs and literally tens of billions in the hundreds of billions of revenue every year.
0:54:38 And of course, you scale that up even larger.
0:54:44 You think about Massachusetts, Boston, all of the economies of these regions, research triangle
0:54:51 in North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon driving change
0:54:52 in those cities.
0:54:58 It’s not just in the, you know, the coast, it’s in the old industrial heartlands where change
0:55:00 has been driven by universities.
0:55:05 University of Idaho, the University of Nebraska, all of these universities are taking huge hits.
0:55:08 This is going to have enormous ripple effects across the entire country.
0:55:11 So I can’t resist.
0:55:13 I didn’t realize you’re on the board of overseers of Harvard.
0:55:20 So my sense is that there’s just a different zeitgeist in higher ed, or one of the differences
0:55:26 is that people in the UK think of universities as sort of a public good, and they don’t feel
0:55:31 the same obligation or gratification or ego boost by giving money back to the university.
0:55:38 I just pulled up that the endowment at Durham is 110 million pounds or about $140 million.
0:55:39 Is that accurate?
0:55:40 That’s about right.
0:55:40 Yeah.
0:55:46 And I’ve actually, you know, given money myself to the university out of my recent book, you
0:55:50 know, for the small stipends and, you know, bursaries for the students.
0:55:56 It’s just not the same scale that it is here in the U.S., including for the public, you
0:56:00 know, and land-grant universities, you know, the big state universities where people tend
0:56:04 to, you know, to give money as well, high schools, the whole education sector.
0:56:10 But where I was headed with it was, Harvard, I believe, has a $53 billion endowment, and it
0:56:13 lets in 1,500 people a year.
0:56:20 And in the U.S., I believe that higher ed, that we’re basically the enforcers of the
0:56:25 caste system, that we have, we create artificial scarcity despite having the resources to dramatically
0:56:30 increase our freshman seats such that we can feel better about ourselves and the value of
0:56:35 the degree goes up for the incumbents at the cost of the entrance and society real large.
0:56:43 Do you think there’s an issue with a place like Harvard, with $53 billion endowment letting
0:56:47 in 1,500 kids a year, do you think the accusation that it’s a hedge fund with offering classes
0:56:50 and not really a public servant, do you think there’s some truth to that accusation?
0:56:53 Well, I think that’s an issue that the university is addressing.
0:56:56 I mean, it’s one of the reasons that I ended up, you know, honestly on the board of overseers.
0:57:00 There’s kind of like this view on the outside, you know, that this is some kind of, you
0:57:03 know, kind of weird start-game setup, but there’s a lot of people from all kinds of diverse
0:57:09 backgrounds there. And I came there as first generation. I mean, my father left school at
0:57:14 14, went down a coal mine, my mother became a nurse, but also left school at 16. You know,
0:57:20 so basically I came from a family with absolutely no means whatsoever, nothing, no savings. And
0:57:25 basically I got to Harvard on a scholarship. I was immediately struck, you know, by many of
0:57:29 the things that you’re talking about there. I’ve given money back, you know, for scholarships
0:57:34 for people like, you know, myself and at the board, and there’s been a lot more discussion
0:57:38 and there’s been a lot more discussion going on at the university over, you know, the last
0:57:42 several decades because they’ve got people like Raj Chetty and others, you know, kind of pushing
0:57:47 out and research this. A man named Anthony Jackson Education School making these same, you know,
0:57:52 kinds of cases. The university has been discussing this in their admissions for some time now.
0:57:57 Many of the people who have come to prominence were first generation. And in fact, the university
0:58:06 just this week announced basically an expansion of its financial aid to students coming from families
0:58:11 would be prospective students who, you know, are in those lowest brackets. But it has to do more
0:58:16 in terms of expanding its access. And there’s all kinds of discussions about this going on
0:58:20 about different platforms. I think the argument could be, well, you know, this could have been
0:58:25 done a lot more quickly. And Harvard and other major universities like it have to actually show
0:58:29 leadership. So there’s absolutely there needs to be this kind of debate about higher education.
0:58:34 But I think the solution to it is not destroying it. And in fact, it’s really getting universities
0:58:38 like the Ivy Leagues, those with the big endowments to work across the entire education sector,
0:58:44 not just higher ed, with trade schools, with community colleges, with the public land grants and
0:58:49 state level universities. So while you’re coming up with these kinds of ideas, I think what we have to
0:58:54 really kind of push the educational sector, and I keep saying educational sector, because I think it
0:58:58 has to be high schools, it has to be libraries, and all the other, you know, kind of parts of all this,
0:59:03 is to kind of find ways of working together. I was just at a conference in Houston, a week ago,
0:59:09 of all the associations that deal in international education. So this is language instruction,
0:59:14 study abroad, you know, and this is not just the elite universities. I mean, I was a kid, you know,
0:59:20 from again, from a mining community, the British underwrote, study abroad, this is a, you know,
0:59:28 mind expanding opportunity and a life changing opportunity for people. So I’m, you know, look,
0:59:31 I’m in agreement that there’s something needs to be done, and something quite drastic. We can’t just
0:59:34 talk about this for another decade. We’re in the crisis now.
0:59:40 Dr. Fiona Hill is a senior fellow at Brookings, chancellor of Durham University, and a former U.S.
0:59:45 National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs. Dr. Hill gained
0:59:50 national recognition for her testimony during the 2019 Trump impeachment inquiry. She’s also a
0:59:56 best-selling author and leading expert on geopolitics. Dr. Hill very much enjoyed this conversation and
1:00:03 hope and trust that we’ll have you on again. Really, really, I love how sort of just sober and calm in
1:00:08 the way you deliver or try to break down or distill what are very complex issues. Really appreciate
1:00:09 your time. No, thank you so much, Scott.
1:00:32 Algebra of happiness. What makes a great day for you? For a long time for me, that was if I worked out. If I work
1:00:38 any given day, I feel like, okay, that was at least a reasonable to good day. That I exercised,
1:00:43 I feel more mentally set. I’m sort of, I’ve always had body dysmorphia. I always feel kind of weak and
1:00:49 skinny. So working out makes me feel better about myself. It’s good for me mentally. I associate a lot
1:00:55 of good things with working out. So any day I worked out was a good day. That has changed for me. And that
1:01:01 is now my new sort of go-to around this is a good day, is if I can FaceTime with my oldest son,
1:01:06 who’s at boarding school during the week, and I can have some time with my youngest. I usually
1:01:11 lay in bed with him just before he falls asleep and we just kind of chat for 10 or 12 minutes.
1:01:18 If I can do those two things, then it was a good day. They make me feel like a good dad. It’s very
1:01:23 cathartic for me. I feel grounded. I like to know that they’re doing all right and they are doing all right.
1:01:28 But when I don’t see them or speak to them every day, my brain goes crazy. Are there something gone
1:01:34 wrong? Are they all right? My communication, this is sort of a corporate lesson. Communication is with
1:01:37 the listener. When you don’t communicate with your employees regularly, they will start communicating
1:01:42 with themselves and coming up with all sorts of crazy, batshit ideas or conspiracies for what’s
1:01:47 actually happening at the firm. You need to communicate consistently. And I find if I’m
1:01:52 not around my sons a lot and I’m not communicating with them a lot, that I start getting anxious
1:01:55 about things. So what I want you to do or what I would suggest you do is the following.
1:02:01 First, find out what is that one thing that every day makes it a good day for you? Is it going to
1:02:06 church? Is it working out? And just be cognizant of it. And also, also, it’s not a bad idea to say,
1:02:12 what one person in my life that I love immensely and know, I know loves me immensely. Does it make
1:02:16 sense to check in every day, whether it’s a text message, a FaceTime, or just to speak to them?
1:02:20 And does that give you comfort every day? What makes a great day for you?
1:02:27 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shallon. Drew Burrows is our
1:02:31 technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network.
1:02:36 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn.
1:02:42 And please follow our Prop G Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and
1:02:42 Thursday.
1:02:56 I’m good now. I don’t know if it’s the edibles I’m eating or the Xanax I had on the plane to get
1:03:00 over the jet lag. Daddy, daddy’s even angrier than usual.
Dr. Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings, chancellor of Durham University, and a former U.S. National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs, joins Scott to discuss Trump’s role in the Russia-Ukraine war, the future of U.S.-Russia relations, and the broader geopolitical effects of the conflict.
Scott opens with his take on Harvard’s announcement that it will provide free tuition for families earning $200,000 or less per year.
Algebra of Happiness: what makes a great day for you?
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