Fiona Hill and the succession to Putin as leader of Russia

I wrote yesterday about a 2016 article by Fiona Hill, the senior adviser on Russia and Europe on Donald Trump's National Security Council (NSC), brought on to the team by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. John Hudson wrote of her at the time of her hiring (Trump Taps Putin Critic for Senior White House Position Foreign Policy 03/02/2017):

Hill, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and former U.S. intelligence officer from 2006 to 2009, has written critically of Putin’s autocratic tendencies and desire of a “weakened U.S. presidency.”

“Blackmail and intimidation are part of his stock in trade,” she wrote in a column last summer explaining Putin’s interest in interfering in America’s presidential elections.

In her 2013 biography of Putin, she warned policymakers not to underestimate the Russian strongman given his strategic cunning and ability to find weaknesses in opponents derived from his experience in the KGB.

Since President Donald Trump’s election in November, she has dismissed the possibility of a dramatic rapprochement with Russia given the inherent differences between Washington and Moscow. “The Russians will get all giddy with expectations, and then they’ll be dashed, like, five minutes into the relationship because the U.S. and Russia just have a very hard time … being on the same page,” she told the Atlantic in November.

But this means she is more a conventional foreign policy analyst of Russia, and not an admirer of the authoritarian, ethno-nationalist and Islamophobic aspects of Putin's politics. Unlike the Steve Bannon partisans.

There were disagreements within the White House on whether Hill should go to the Trump-Putin meeting last week. (Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay, Trump Aides Want Kremlin Critic in Putin Meeting Daily Beast 07/05/2017) While Hill did go on the trip for the G-20 summit, Trump allowed neither her nor McMaster to attend the meeting with Putin.

Kate Brannen in The Knives Are Out for Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster Foreign Policy 05/09/2017 wrote about the infighting against McMaster and his supposed loyalists.

In other words, Hill is in a major NSC position dealing with Russian affairs. But it's uncertainly how much of her advice and counsel on the topic gets to the President himself, much less how seriously he takes it.

The article I discussed yesterday was Putin: The one-man show the West doesn’t understand (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 72:3 2016). In it, she stresses one of her favorite themes, the distinct ways in which Putin's experience as a KGB officer shape his governing as President of Russia.

Dædalus had an issue this year devoted to the topic "Russia Beyond Putin" (146:2 Spring 2017) As the theme indicates, the articles give particular attention to the functioning of the political system and practical considerations about how a successor to Putin will be selected. This is the "Kremlinology" of our time. Fiona Hill contributes an essay to that issue, The Next Mr. Putin? The Question of Succession.

This is an important observation of Hill's, defining Russia's current brand of what is often called illiberal democracy, though she doesn't use the term here:

The Russian president is not an autocrat like the tsar with divine right to rule. Nor is the president a dictator, who can simply give orders from above and be sure that things will get done outside the Kremlin walls. The president’s legitimacy depends on proof, in both electoral results and opinion polls, that he is genuinely popular. After Putin’s rough reentry in 2012, the next presidential election will be an important pivot point for the system, as will the subsequent Duma elections, and the projected end of Putin’s presidential terms in 2024. Putin and the ruling party will have to clear each electoral hurdle with a resounding victory and significant majority of the votes.

This is a talk she gave to the International Institute of European Affairs (IIEA) on the topic, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, which is also the title of the 2013 biography she co-authored:

In seeming contrast to the argument she makes in the Bulletin article about how Putin runs the government heavily based on his own experiences in the KGB, in Dædalus she talks about his careful political planning. This article has a similar focus to her IIEA talk.

In a different contribution to the same journal issue, Henry Hale describes the Russian political system as dominated by what he calls "patronalism," a system in which personal and family networks play such a key role that they override the rule of law and formal political procedures and even organizations like political parties.

Hill points to some actions of Putin's that seem to fit with Hale describes as patronalism. For instance:

In 2016, Putin moved to consolidate Russia’s military and paramilitary structures and to weaken the power bases and independent authority of individual agencies by putting in place a smaller cadre at the top of the security elite who directly report to him. In April 2016, Putin issued a decree on creating the new National Guard–essentially his own personal army – appointing Viktor Zolotov, the former head of his Presidential Security Service (SBP), to lead it. ...

[These and other] appointments ensured that people in charge of important state institutions and functions would have close individual relationships with Vladimir Putin. Many of the replacements were, like Dyumin, younger figures from the security services and Putin’s bodyguard corps. Given their age and relative lack of experience, in contrast to their predecessors, they had not (yet) achieved the independent standing or built a power base to challenge him. [my emphasis]

But, as we saw above, she cautions that she does not regard Putin's government as a dictatorship. And her following comment suggests that Putin is likely to want to reduce the role of patronalism in the Russian system:

... Putin has a personal obsession with the idea of Russia as a “dictatorship of the law,” where law is an instrument of the state that directs and constrains political and individual behavior. The Russian constitution is the law above all laws. It was drafted by a team led by Putin and Medvedev’s mentor at Leningrad University Law Faculty – and their boss as mayor of St. Petersburg – Anatolii Sobchak. The team drew on Sobchak’s work on nineteenth-century Russian legal and constitutional thought. So, in this respect, the Russian president is the first Russian constitutional monarch, albeit in an elected monarchy. [my emphasis]

And she offers two models of how that transition could take place. The first is, "the USSR of the late Soviet period, when the state was institutionally and politically complex. Each individual Soviet republic had its own party and government structures. Their intraelite politics contributed to the leadership dynamics of the central Communist Party and the politburo."

The second model she suggests comes from France Japan:

Over the next decade, the existing framework of United Russia [Putin's main party], or movements like the All-Russian People’s Front and Kremlin-sponsored youth organizations, could be drawn on to create a new structure with bureaucratic instruments to carry the system forward. This would, in essence, be a holding mechanism for powerful people, and one powerful person in particular. One potential model, which could address the many facets of the “Putin problem,” might be the moderately conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan. The LDP is a pragmatically motivated power structure that serves as a frame for collective bargaining among major power-brokers to avoid ruinous factional battles. Since its creation in the 1950s, the LDP has provided a “home” for former powerful prime ministers between elections and at the end of their terms. Russian officials have periodically shown considerable interest in the creation and structures of the LDP in bilateral meetings with Japanese counter parts, and notably returned to this theme in 2016.

So she sees a real likelihood that Putin would actively encourage a development toward more secure rule of law and greater institutional regularity.

White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill on Vladimir Putin

Fiona Hill is President Trump's senior Russian expert on the National Security Council. (Kyle Scott Clauss, Fiona Hill, Trump’s New Russia Expert, Went to Harvard Boston Daily 03/02/2017)

She wasn't even invited to go to Europe with Trump and his team last week when the Trump-Putin summit took place. (Correction 07/13/2017: Hill did go on the summit trip but was not invited to the Trump-Putin meeting.)

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an article by her last year: Fiona Hill (2016) Putin: The one-man show the West doesn’t understand (Bulletin 72:3 2016).

She also talks about Putin in this podcast from the Legatum Institute dated 05/03/2015, titled, "Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin with Fiona Hill." she is the co-author with Clifford G. Gaddy by that title, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013).

The Bulletin article is an interesting combination of pragmatic observation and some dubious psychological assumptions merged with stock Western images of Russia.

She affirms several broad assumptions that seem to command a remarkable amount of consensus across the political spectrum about post-Soviet Russia:

Even though the superpower nuclear arsenals were retained, US leaders thought that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they had created a new framework for relations with Russia, and that the new Russia, under President Boris Yeltsin, had agreed to that new framework. Putin sees it differently. Russians (at least Russians like him) never agreed to accept the role the West assigned them in the new framework – the status of a large but second-rank European country ... If treaties were signed, or pledges made, says Putin, it was because post-Soviet Russia was too weak to say no. It was a fragmented and chaotic state, on the verge of bankruptcy, kept on life support by International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. The Russia of the 1990s that the West so admired was, in practice, not a sovereign country.

This consensus narrative usually includes the disintegration of the USSR with fairly rapid declarations of independence by various former Soviet republics, notably including Ukraine and Georgia, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Per capita income and standards of living declined sharply in Russia, as President Boris Yeltsin's government brought in the IMF and Western economic advisers and applied the neoliberal economic shock therapy they recommended. The result was similar to those in all places the neoliberal prescription is applied: low wages, high unemployment, decline of state services. And the privatization which is part of the package turned many senior Soviet officials and managers of state enterprises into the now-notorious Russian oligarchy. The two decades after the USSR's fall saw two nasty wars in the Muslim Caucasian republic of Chechnya.

In foreign policy, things generally went in a way that many Russians regarded as retrogression. The progressive expansion of NATO, including the Baltic states. The Kosovo War. The invasion of Iraq. Georgia and Ukraine pursued closer ties with Europe and aspired to join NATO themselves. All this was perceived by Russians as a threat to their national security and an insult to their national pride.

Hill doesn't go into all those events in her article. But she agrees with the broad line of the account. At the moment, there doesn't really seem to be a notable difference in this narrative between those who are New Cold War enthusiasts and those with more pragmatic and less war-oriented views. It's just that the hawks look at that sequence and take the position of, so what if they perceived things that way? We do what we want and the Russians just need to sit back and take it.

And most narratives agree that, in one way or another, Putin became a popular figure by improving the country's economic performance, fighting corruption or at least organizing it better, and becoming more assertive in foreign policy. Putin is generally understood to have regarded the fall of the USSR as a geopolitical disaster and humiliation for Russia. Hill writes, "For him, the Soviet-era international paradigm has not changed so much."

And although she takes a dim view of Putin, she also reminds her readers of the need for practical negotiation on common problems and common interests. "Russia demands and what Western leaders are willing to give may be irreconcilable. But that is what negotiation is all about – moving toward mutually acceptable positions. To negotiate, you have to talk, even to those you do not like, including Russian President Vladimir Putin."

Those are all encouraging signs of pragmatism. There is nothing in her article glorifying the pursuit of the sort of ethnic nationalism and religious chauvinism that America's alt-right and their counterparts in Europe find so attractive about Putin's politics.

Putin's psychology

Hill's descriptions of Putin strike me as more questionable. As the title of her book indicates, she views Putin as being overwhelmingly defined by his role as a KGB officer.

As a former KGB agent, Putin operates very differently from a president who climbed the ranks of a political party – including both of his predecessors, first post-Soviet Russian President Boris Yeltsin and last Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party and President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. Operatives like Putin usually have political oversight, political handlers, and an institutional frame. Putin himself was subject to these constraints in his previous career. Today, Putin has no such constraints. There are no significant checks and balances on his presidential power.

And if you're thinking, hey, wasn't some other Russian leader a KGB guy, too? Yes, but Hill dismisses the precedent as follows, "No other leader has worked his way, as Putin did, through the back corridors of the intelligence services to become the president. Former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was chairman of the KGB for 15 years, but Andropov never actually served in the agency; he was a career Communist Party functionary."

Now, obviously people are heavily shaped by their personal experiences. But she seems to be trying hard to making the case that Putin is more of a spy than a politician: "Putin, by contrast, was not a Communist luminary. Nor had he any high-profile executive experience before coming to Moscow in 1996. Since ascending to the presidency in 2000, he has fused intelligence, security, politics, and even oversight of the commanding heights of the economy into one Kremlin-based operating system rooted in informal networks of power."

I'm reserved about this view, because we heard from various commentators in the lead-up to last week's Putin-Trump meeting about how Putin's KGB training provided him with particular specialized training in charming, deceiving and cajoling people. But then a lot of normal diplomacy is about charming, deceiving and cajoling people, too. And it's not as though Russian politics has been known for its cordiality and lack of intrigue.

She notes, "He and his Kremlin spin doctors have worked hard at making him as inscrutable and unpredictable as possible to increase his tactical advantage." That sounds plausible enough. But spin doctors are also a standard part of politics and corporate public relations. Nothing especially KGB-y about that.

At least in this article, it's not clear on what she bases the following judgment:

But Putin does not know the West well. He has limited experience living abroad – in Dresden in East Germany from 1985–1990. This was hardly a window on the West. Although Putin speaks German, and speaks it well, he has only a handful of contacts with European and US political and business insiders, some of whom he met as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s. Putin does not have deep insight into the way our societies work, nor does he care to obtain it.

But then we hear all the time these days, especially from Democrats and the mainstream media, about how Putin's government is running a super-sophisticated political subversion operation in Europe and the United States. Gene Lyons writes, expressing an opinion that seems to be common among Democrats and liberals these days, "the single greatest threat to the integrity of Western democracy is the Kremlin." (Trump’s G-20: A World-Class Presidential “Kayfabe” National Memo 07/12/2017)

So it's a bit hard to imagine Putin being so incurious about the West. He's certainly shown a great deal of sophistication in dealing with Germany since he's been head of the national government.

Stock Images of Russia

We've seen the resurgence of various cliches about Russia like those we commonly heard during Cold War 1.0. Like various tales about Russian drunkenness. So it's worth being cautious about such shopworn claims, such as assuming that particular priorities in present-day Russian policy are due to some centuries-old territorial or cultural obsession.

Hill stresses the inscrutability of Russia and Russian politics for Westerners. This aura of inscrutability gave us the word "Kremlinology," which has come to stand for trying to understand any kind of impenetrable goings-on. Applying the term to understanding the Trump Family Business Administration gives the term even more nuance.

Of course, Russia tries to keep state secrets. So do all other countries. It's axiomatic that more authoritarian governments are more difficult to analyze than more democratic ones. But elections over the last year or so in North Atlantic countries (Trump, Brexit, Macron in France) suggest that even the most open liberal democracies may have their own kind of inscrutability.

With Russia as an adversary, which is how the US has generally viewed for most of the last 100 years, charging them with "inscrutability" in their government affairs serves a couple of useful purposes. One is that it makes them sound more mysterious and therefore more dangerous, perhaps at the cost of adding an exotic element to its image that also has its appeal. It also reminds us of how luck we should feel to have specialists who can explain the mysterious Rooskis to us.

Most Americans don't speak or read Russian, including me. But I have enough familiarity with a couple of other languages to do a double-take when I see comments like this:

To Russian ears, Putin is very clear about what he and Russia really want, but his plot-driven analysis and way of trying to communicate his demands do not work with Western interlocutors.

Putin’s language is loaded in Russian – a simple translation into English of what he says does not convey the deeper meaning behind the words and expressions. The language of Russian politics and diplomacy that Putin favors is inherently “alpha male.” [my emphasis]

I'm going to make a generalization here that goes way beyond my own personal knowledge and guess that political rhetoric in nearly every language on earth is "loaded." Except maybe for your random isolated tribe in the jungles of Paraguay or Brazil. Yes, most Americans, including highly educated ones, are unlikely to be familiar with the nuances of political phrasing in other countries. Even English-speaking ones.

But that "to Russian ears" comment is another example of making Russia sound exotic and mysterious.

But this judgment of Putin's foreign policy outlook doesn't seem to rely too much on pop psychology or stale stereotypes:

Everything Western leaders and analysts say about Russia’s internal weakness – economic, ethnic, political, and religious – or about the inevitability that Putin will fail in securing his objectives, or that the state will be pulled apart by domestic tensions, gets Putin’s antennae up. It is a signal to him that the United States and the West are “at it again” – trying to play with opposition and other groups to bring down Russia. Whenever we talk of Russia’s weakness, we increase Putin’s and other Russians’ sense of vulnerability. In feeling threatened, they react forcefully. Putin doubles down, he does not draw back. From his perspective, it is the West that needs to back off or be pushed back.

Which sounds like the kind of situation that requires deft, careful diplomacy well informed by sound intelligence and real expertise.

So far, that does not seem to be the approach of the White House she serves.