Fiona Hill on Trump, Putin and Why Great Powers Fall

Fiona Hill holds out her hand with a pre-emptive wince. She’s shaken so many hands over the past week, congratulating graduates of Durham University, that her own is hurting. It’s an occupational hazard of being the university’s chancellor, a post she has held since 2023, but it’s one she bears cheerfully.

Presiding over Durham’s graduation exercises earlier this month held deep meaning for Ms. Hill. She grew up in Bishop Auckland, a down-at-the-heels former coal-mining town, 11 miles from Durham. Education, initially at St. Andrews University in Scotland, was her ticket out, the first step on a journey that began in 1984 when her father, a miner turned hospital porter, warned his ambitious daughter, “There’s nothing here for you, pet.”

She landed, instead, in the United States. From Harvard to the Brookings Institution, from the White House to a congressional committee debating whether to impeach President Trump in 2019, Ms. Hill scaled the heights in her adopted land.

Testifying to lawmakers in a distinctive northern burr, she became that rarest of species: a celebrity foreign-policy analyst. Her damning description of Mr. Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. — she called it a “domestic political errand” — was a riveting moment.

“When my dad said, ‘There’s nothing here for you,’” she recalled, he gave her a title for her memoir. But it rankled some of her fellow northerners. “They wanted to say, ‘Come on, there is something for you here.’”

Now 59, living with her husband and college-age daughter in suburban Washington, Ms. Hill spends about six weeks a year in Durham, presiding over ceremonies, getting briefed on the university’s finances and taking a bus to see her mother, who lives in a nursing home in Bishop Auckland. (Her father died in 2012.)

As she was in academia and at the White House, Ms. Hill is a trenchant analyst of a troubled world. Perched on a sun-dappled bench next to Durham’s cathedral, she ranged across a stormy landscape, from the rise of populism and the crisis in higher education in Britain and the United States to what she considers the twin threats of Donald J. Trump and Vladimir V. Putin.

Ms. Hill has been back in the headlines since the British government asked her to be a co-author of a strategic review of defense policy for an era in which Russia is menacing Europe, and the United States is retreating from it. She is uncertain about whether Mr. Trump’s harsher tone toward Mr. Putin in recent days represents a decisive change in his position, but she is skeptical that it would blunt Mr. Putin’s aggression.

“I don’t think Putin is really concerned if Trump’s angry, because he thinks there’s a limit to what Trump’s going to do — and I think he’s right,” said Ms. Hill, who formulated Russia policy in the National Security Council during Mr. Trump’s first term (she also served under George W. Bush and Barack Obama). “He’s pretty confident right now, particularly given the chaos in the United States, and the United States undermining its own security.”

In the strategic review, Ms. Hill and her co-authors, George Robertson, a former secretary general of NATO, and Richard Barrons, a retired British Army general, called for new investments in British nuclear and conventional forces. They also focused on the home front, arguing that Britain needed a whole-of-society approach to make it more resilient against proliferating threats.

Education is the link in the chain that most troubles Ms. Hill these days. British universities, she says, are poorly financed and ill suited to a world in which technology is revolutionizing the nature of war and work.

“I did wonder, as the graduates walked across the stage, will everything they trained for still require a person?” Ms. Hill said. “It’s not wrong to think universities need to have a major period of introspection.”

Durham University, founded in 1832, is one of the oldest universities in England. Its majestic buildings, including a Norman castle used as a student dormitory, belie a parlous financial position.

“My whole intellectual journey is about trying to understand the rise and fall of great powers,” Ms. Hill said, crediting the British historian Paul Kennedy, whose 1987 book resonated with her as a young woman trying to make sense of the England of miners’ strikes and Margaret Thatcher.

“Why did the northeast of England go from being the Silicon Valley of its age to being a forgotten backwater?” she said. Later, at St. Andrews, she recalled asking herself, “Why did the Soviet Union collapse?” Searching for an answer took her to language studies in Moscow and a fellowship at Harvard.

With Mr. Trump’s return to office, Ms. Hill sees parallels between the United States and fallen empires. The president, she said, could end up playing a role like that of Boris Yeltsin, who brought on the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. “Trump is deconstructing the United States, just as Yeltsin deconstructed the Soviet Union,” she said.

Ms. Hill evinces little interest in psychoanalyzing Mr. Trump (“It’s all about him,” she said briskly). She is more interested in what a wave of Trump-like populism rolling around the world means for the great powers.

“What Putin has tried to do in retaking Ukraine is a massive blunder, a massive error,” she said, arguing that Russia would not recapture imperial glory and would ruin its economy in the process. “It’s going to be harder this time around to demilitarize the economy,” she said, “than it was with a collapse of the Soviet Union.”

And yet Ms. Hill predicted that Russia would survive this misadventure, as it has many others in its history. Ditto for Britain, which faces the rise of its own populist leader, Nigel Farage, and his anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K. She acknowledged that Reform was appealing to voters at a time when the Labour government seemed paralyzed.

“Trump and Reform give a sense of action,” she said. “But they’re not fixing things. In fact, in some sense, they’re breaking things. That sense of inability to act is the real challenge for all democratic systems,” she continued. “Populism offers quick fixes for extraordinarily difficult problems.”

For all its problems, however, she said Britain had ample human capacity and the glue of cherished customs. She marveled at the miners’ gala in Durham this month, an annual parade still held decades after the mines closed.

After the self-inflicted damage of Brexit, Ms. Hill said, she was hopeful that Britain had “pretty much bottomed out.” Of course, she couldn’t help adding, with a mordant laugh, “there’s always a subbasement.”