The senior fellow at Brookings and expert on modern Russia had hoped to guide the U.S.-Russia relationship. President Trump had other ideas.
The Brookings Institution is one of many think tanks in Washington, D.C., where scholars and bureaucrats sit in quiet offices and wait by the phone. They write op-eds and books, give talks and convene seminars, hoping that, when reputations falter or Administrations shift, they will be rescued from the life of opining and contemplation and return to the adrenaline rush and consequence of government. Nearly always, the yearning is to be inside. Strobe Talbott, who became the president of Brookings in 2002, served in Bill Clinton’s Administration as his leading Russia expert, and he was rumored to be on the shortlist for Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State. Others, too, may have expected a call. But, after Donald Trump was elected, only one prominent Brookings stalwart was summoned, and her story became emblematic of all those in Washington who entered the Administration full of trepidation but hoping to be a “normalizing” influence on a distinctly abnormal President.
Fiona Hill, a leading expert on Russia and its modern leadership, had a reputation as a blunt speaker and an independent thinker and analyst. The daughter of a miner and a midwife, she grew up in Bishop Auckland, in northern England, and has a strong northern accent. She described herself to me as “politically engaged but antipartisan.” She has a distaste for the kind of ideological standoff that she observed in the eighties between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, which was, as she put it, “a clash of titans with regular people smashed in between.”
Hill, who was born in 1965, is a senior fellow at Brookings, and a denizen of the Eurasia Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Harvard University, where she got her doctorate in history. She was a national intelligence officer in the Administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In 2013, she and Clifford Gaddy, an economic specialist at Brookings, published “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” which traces Vladimir Putin’s path from his hardscrabble upbringing in Leningrad to his years in the government. She was wary of Obama’s efforts to downplay Russia’s importance in the world—he called the country a “regional power”—convinced that doing so only provoked Putin to assert himself more forcefully. In an updated edition of the book, published in 2015, Hill and Gaddy described Putin as “arguably the most powerful individual in the world.” Hill’s friend Nina Khrushcheva, the granddaughter of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, said that Putin was “secretly flattered” by the portrayal. Continue reading.