Russia is at war with Britain, the US is no longer a reliable ally and the UK has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient, according to one of the three authors of the strategic defence review.
Fiona Hill, from county Durham, became the White House’s chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump’s first term and contributed to the British government’s strategy. She made the remarks in an interview with the Guardian.
“We’re in pretty big trouble,” Hill said, describing the UK’s geopolitical situation as caught between “the rock” of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and “the hard place” of Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable US.
Hill, 59, is perhaps the best known of the reviewers appointed by Labour, alongside Lord Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, and the retired general Sir Richard Barrons. She said she was happy to take on the role because it was “such a major pivot point in global affairs”. She remains a dual national after living in the US for more than 30 years.
“Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,” Hill said, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as a starting point to Moscow becoming “a dominant military power in all of Europe”.
As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already “menacing the UK in various different ways,” she said, citing “the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they’re putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.”
The conclusion, Hill said, was that “Russia is at war with us”. The foreign policy expert, a longtime Russia watcher, said she had first made a similar warning in 2015, in a revised version of a book she wrote about the Russian president with Clifford Gaddy, reflecting on the invasion and annexation of Crimea.
“We said Putin had declared war on the west,” she said. At the time, other experts disagreed, but Hill said events since had demonstrated “he obviously had, and we haven’t been paying attention to it”. The Russian leader, she argues, sees the fight in Ukraine as “part of a proxy war with the United States; that’s how he has persuadedChina,North KoreaandIranto join in”.
Putin believed that Ukraine had already been decoupled from the US relationship, Hill said, because “Trump really wants to have a separate relationship with Putin to do arms control agreements and also business that will probably enrich their entourages further, though Putin doesn’t need any more enrichment”.
When it came to defence, however, she said the UK could not rely on the military umbrella of the US as during the cold war and in the generation that followed, at least “not in the way that we did before”. In her description, the UK “is having to manage its number one ally”, though the challenge is not to overreact because “you don’t want to have a rupture”.
This way of thinking appears inthe defence reviewpublished earlier this week, which says “the UK’s longstanding assumptions about global power balances and structures are no longer certain” – a rare acknowledgment in a British government document of how far and how fast Trumpism is affecting foreign policy certainties.
The review team reported to Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and the defence secretary, John Healey. Most of Hill’s interaction were with Healey, however, and she said she had met the prime minister only once – describing him as “pretty charming … in a proper and correct way” and as “having read all the papers”.
Hill was not drawn on whether she had advised Starmer or Healey on how to deal with Donald Trump, saying instead: “The advice I would give is the same I would give in a public setting.” She said simply that the Trump White House “is not an administration, it is a court” in which a transactional president is driven by his “own desires and interests, and who listens often to the last person he talks to”.
She added that unlike his close circle, Trump had “a special affinity for the UK” based partly on his own family ties (his mothercame from the Hebridean island of Lewis, emigrating to New York aged 18) and an admiration for the royal family, particularlythe late queen. “He talked endlessly about that,” she said.
On the other hand, Hill is no fan of the populist right administration in the White House and worries it could come to Britain if “the same culture wars” are allowed to develop with the encouragement of Republicans from the US.
She noted that Reform UK had won a string of council elections last month, including in her native Durham, and that the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, wanted to emulate some of the aggressive efforts to restructure government led by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) before his falling-out with Trump.
“When Nigel Farage says hewants to do a Dogeagainst the local county council, he should come over here [to the US] and see what kind of impact that has,” she said. “This is going to be the largest layoffs in US history happening all at once, much bigger than hits to steelworks and coalmines.”
Hill’s argument is that in a time of profound uncertainty, Britain needs greater internal cohesion if it is to protect itself. “We can’t rely exclusively on anyone any more,” she said, arguing that Britain needed to have “a different mindset” based as much on traditional defence as on social resilience.
Some of that, Hill said, was about a greater recognition of the level of external threat and initiatives for greater integration, by teaching first aid in schools or encouraging more teenagers to join school cadet forces, a recommendation of the defence review. “What you need to do is get people engaged in all kinds of different ways in support of their communities,” she said.
Hill said she saw that deindustrialisation and a rise of inequality in Russia and the US had contributed to the rise in national populism in both countries. Politicians in Britain, or elsewhere, “have to be much more creative and engage people where they are at” as part of a “national effort”, she said.
If this seems far away from a conventional view of defence, that’s because it is, though Hill also argues that traditional conceptions of war are changing as technology evolves and with it what makes a potent force.
“People keep saying the British army has the smallest number of troops since the Napoleonic era. Why is the Napoleonic era relevant? Or that we have fewer ships than the time of Charles II. The metrics are all off here,” she said. “The Ukrainians are fighting with drones. Even though they have no navy, they sank a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet.”
Her aim, therefore, is not just to be critical but to propose solutions. Hill recalled that a close family friend, on hearing that she had taken on the defence review, had told her: “‘Don’t tell us how shite we are, tell us what we can do, how we can fix things.’ People understand that we have a problem and that the world has changed.”