"Fiona Hill: What does Trump see in Putin?"

Marz's Soviet History class hasn't reached WWII yet, so she was jumping ahead, asking me about the Cold War.
"Who won?" she said.

Good question! In the 1990s, I'd have said the West won the Cold War.
Now, I'd say it's an open question... maybe it's not exactly over?
Russian expert, Fiona Hill, formerly in US Intelligence, doesn't call our situation a continuation of the Cold War though. She calls it World War III:
"It's already happening."

Foreign Affairs podcast: "A Conversation With Fiona Hill: What Does Trump See in Putin? ", (56 min.) March 13, 2025

Ya kinda weep to hear someone articulate, thoughtful, and informed speak about the issues. (And she's dryly funny.) Plus, because she speaks Russian, she can tell us that Putin makes fun of Trump to his face... in Russian.

Was Trump recruited by the KGB, who hold compromising material on him?

"We have material on him!" she said. "He's already been found guilty."
The Russians didn't have to recruit Trump--he loves Putin, and all they need to lead him by the nose is FLATTERY.
(Zelensky didn't understand this, and failed to do it.)

It's scary stuff. A slight comfort might be had from reading Robert Reich's fourth round of of reasons for Very Modest Optimism  https://robertreich.substack.com/p/even-more-reasons-for-modest-optimism

Though Reich doesn't touch Putin (no cause for even modest optimism there), he does say, in #9. It’s become apparent this week that Trump is, ironically, the great unifier of Europe.

Listen to the Hill interview at the podcast (linked up top), or you can listen right here, on youTube:

Hill's accent is northeast England, btw (I wasn't sure)--her father was a coalminer, and she said her interview for admission at Oxford was like a scene out of Billy Elliot.

""Fiona Hill spent years studying Putin and Russia as a scholar and U.S. intelligence official before serving, in the first Trump administration, as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council.

"Fiona Hill became a household name during Trump’s first impeachment, when her testimony provided crucial insights into Trump’s dynamic with Putin and his early interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Today, she is a senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and serves as chancellor of Durham University."

BOOKS:

The Kremlin’s Strange Victory (2021) by Fiona Hill--reviewed at Foreign Affairs, "How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline"

The World Putin Wants (2022), by Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, review: "How Distortions About the Past Feed Delusions About the Future"

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