Russia expert Fiona Hill on how Putin takes advantage of American

Remember Fiona Hill, the British-accented (but American citizen), very smart Russia expert from the National Security Council who became briefly famous for her testimony during the first Trump impeachment process?

I sure do. She impressed me with her testimony, her subject expertise, her working-class accent, her Harvard Ph.D. and her integrity when she testified.

She’s out of government service now as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and she’s just written a recap of what she learned and figured about Putin and Russia and how Putin utilized Trump for the November/December issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Her piece is titled: “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory: How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline.”

It’s not short; it’s very smart while still understandable; it’s accessible right here; and if you have time go there now, don’t waste any more time.

But, if you’re still here, I’ll offer a few excerpts and provide the link again at the bottom. The excerpts start just below. Hill wrote:

It would have been impossible for any close observer of recent Russian history to not recall those episodes on January 6, when a mob whipped up by Trump and his allies—who had spent weeks claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him—stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop the formal certification of the election results. The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of four years of conspiracies and lies that Trump and his allies had fed to his supporters on social media platforms, in speeches, and on television. The “Big Lie” that Trump had won the election was built on the backs of the thousands of little lies that Trump uttered nearly every time he spoke and that were then nurtured within the dense ecosystem of Trumpist media outlets. This was yet one more way in which, under Trump, the United States came to resemble Russia, where Putin has long solidified his grip on power by manipulating the Russian media, fueling nationalist grievances, and peddling conspiracy theories…

…Putin also blurs the line between domestic and foreign policy to distract the Russian population from the distortions and deficiencies of his rule. On the one hand, he stresses how decadent and dissolute the United States has become and how ill suited its leaders are to teach anyone a lesson on how to run a country. On the other hand, he stresses that the United States still poses a military threat and that it aims to bring Russia to its knees. Putin’s constant refrain is that the contest between Russia and the United States is a perpetual Darwinian struggle and that without his leadership, Russia will not survive. Without Putin, there is no Russia. He does not want things to get completely out of hand and lead to war. But he also does not want the standoff to fade away or…