Fiona Hill On Putin’s War And Populism

Plus: the vital importance right now of long contemplative walks.

Fiona was an intel analyst under Bush and Obama, and then served under Trump as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Currently a senior fellow at Brookings and the chancellor of Durham University, her books include Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century — which we discussed on the Dishcast in 2022.

For two clips of our convo — on Russia’s imperial war, and a comparison of Putin and Trump — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Fiona’s recent long trip to northeast England; walking the length of Hadrian’s Wall; industrial decline; mass migration; how London is increasingly non-English; the brain drain from smaller places; the revival of nationalism; the fading left-right distinction; populism as a style; the Tory collapse and Reform’s rise; NATO; the Munich Security Conference and Vance; the Zelensky meeting at the White House; Soviet ideology; the Russian Empire; Putin’s psyops with social media; sending North Koreans into battle; the pipeline attacks; Ukraine’s innovative use of drones; the massive casualties of the attrition war; Russia’s resilient economy; the new corruption scandal in Ukraine; war profiteering; Putin’s attacks on civilians; his manipulation of Trump; ressentiment in the West; male resentment in the economy; white-collar job insecurity due to AI; the origins of the BBC and its current scandal; the NHS; the slowing US economy; MTG positioning herself as the real MAGA; revolutions eating their own; Epstein; the demolished East Wing; and what my latest DNA test revealed.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Mark Halperin on US politics, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, Shadi Hamid on US power abroad, Jason Willick on trade and conservatism, Vivek Ramaswamy on the right, George Packer on his Orwell-inspired novel, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Cory Clark on sex differences:

Great Dishcast as always.

A quirk of contemporary psychology is that the supposedly outmoded term “neurotic” is still all but indistinguishable from the personality trait of neuroticism. Woody Allen-types now can be thought of as “persons high in neuroticism,” but the reasons for that characterisation — worry, catastrophising, excessive emotional reactivity, inability to mindfully enjoy the present moment, etc — haven’t changed much from the dustily Freudian in the ‘60s or ‘70s, when distinctions were drawn between neurotics who need therapy and psychotics who need Haldol.

Another writes:

Your conversation with Cory Clark was a very nice complement to the one you did with Cat Bohannon two years ago.

As you and Clark were discussing the various behavioral differences between the sexes, I did fall prey to an inclination that you were actually exploring differences between the — gasp — genders!

I am the father of a teenage natal boy who asserts a female identity. This reality has thrust me into the marquee parenting challenge of our time, and with it, an opportunity to study things I never thought I’d need to know. An important part of my education was initiated by your episode with Hannah Barnes. Her book, Time to Think, had marvelous insights and led me to additional research that resulted in my standing athwart a medical intervention that was barreling down the tracks. So we’re taking time to think — to experience puberty and to focus on addressing various pressing, non-gender-related challenges.

As you and Clark carried on about men and women, I was thinking about my child who, if I had to wager, is on track to become a gay man. That assessment is based on 14 years of Daddy’s Intuition. It is not an intuition shared by various medical professionals, school staff, or even my wife (fully, at least). It may be wrong, but I feel it in my bones.

I have a strong view on the pronoun debate, believing that pronouns belong to the speaker who chooses the words, not to the subject. One should choose words respectfully but honestly. So, given the uncertainties and preferences of the parties, I try not to use pronouns with respect to this child but, instead, use the name recently selected by my child. I find that to be a pragmatic and achievable approach.

For the purposes of my letter here, I’ll use “Pat” — which can work for either sex (a la Julia Sweeney on SNL). Pat has a lot of behaviors that you and Clark ascribed to women. My concern is that the stereotyping you employed — reflective of real bell curves though it may be — serves to narrow the acceptable ways in which Pat can be a boy. Pat already has many people reinforcing Pat’s own belief that Pat is a girl. The stereotyping of behaviors reinforces it further, making it harder for Pat to conceive of life as a boy with feminine interests and behaviors if evolution is telling us those behaviors is evidence Pat is a girl.

We’ve recently been binge-watching Derry Girls, one of Pat’s favorite shows. I’m struck by the way in which the relationships between the Derry Girls conform to Clark’s description of groups of boys rather than girls. Pat loves how the Derry Girls are constantly fighting with one another, creating mayhem and then making up in time for their next escapade. (Incidentally, the Sister Michael character is the nun you were looking for to whip little ones into line.) Is this more evidence that Pat is a boy? Or can Derry Girls be girls?

The key, it seems to me, is to grapple with what a bell curve tells you. It tells you that there are real group differences between men and women (and other groups) that we have to take into account in devising any sort of policy. But on an individual level, all of this is completely irrelevant. Of course there are boys who behave more stereotypically like girls than many girls, and vice-versa. The very bell curve that reveals the broad group difference also shows us that individual humans will always defeat the odds. I find this a wonderful part of being human. Others see it as some kind of threat to equality.

Here’s a dissent:

I just finished listening to the episode with Cory Clark on sex differences and was uncharacteristically disappointed with the discussion. I love your podcast and I’m always so delighted with your critical thinking and your ability to move your guests away from generalizing and toward more precise articulation of their ideas … not this time, though. I was frustrated that a discussion that started out by referencing behavioral research about differences between men and women really didn’t go anywhere — and then wound up on grade inflation at Harvard and the usual complaints about DEI.

I’m a retired scientist and lived through the whole societal adjustment to women entering “male-dominated” professions. My own life experience is that people are capable of huge adaptations, and that when you teach people how to set aside gender stereotypes, the professions can transform themselves and thrive.

What I think would have been more interesting (and enlightening) to discuss are examples of how behavior has so radically changed as the sexes have crossed into each other’s territory. For example, I would love to learn about how the military has adapted its training for women — for both combat and non-combat roles; how they have trained men to accept female commanders; and how they have trained women to BE commanders. And then for men: how do they fare as they enter the “female” professions like nursing; how does their self-image change; and how do they earn trust from their patients who don’t expect a man in that role?

And if you really want to dig into fundamental biological differences between the sexes, I recommend you learn more about ongoing neuroscience research on the sexual differentiation of the brain. If you have not heard of her already, the work of Dr. Margaret McCarthy at the University of Maryland School of Medicine would be an excellent place to start.

As always, thank you for your work. I offer my comments knowing that you value a wide range of perspectives.

I do. And I take your point. There are always directions a conversation can go that, for some reason, never crop up. I try and get to most points but sometimes the flow takes you elsewhere. And the point about a podcast, in my opinion, is that it is all about flow. We do extremely minor edits.

Here’s another listener:

In your conversation with Dr. Clark, the two of you inadvertently acted out the differences between men and women she was describing, with you talking loudly, occasionally swearing and making demands, and she, being careful not to offend you with her words, softening any hard message she might deliver.

Another writes, “I hope you start sleeping better (you sounded in a foul mood with Cory Clark).” Yeah, I really was a bit crabby that day and I’m sorry I was a little impatient with Cory at the start of the conversation. My only defense again is that a podcast is by definition a flawed human conversation; I don’t think of it as an interview or a debate. Which means sometimes I’m gonna be not-my-best some days. Nothing I can do but cop to it when I let you down.

Here’s a guest rec:

Your interview with Cory Clark made me think of Coleman Hughes’ recent interview with Carole Hooven, who did an excellent job explaining the biology of sex. She was a Harvard biology professor pushed out by gender insanity for stating scientific fact.

I have unsubscribed from all things Free Press except for Coleman’s podcast. The FP has an agenda but acts like it doesn’t — and it drives me crazy. But Coleman still seems to have his head screwed on in a balanced way. His interview was excellent, and I think it speaks to much of what you were trying to understand with Clark. Hooven might be a great guest for the Dish.

She’s actually been on the Dishcast twice already — for her book about testosterone, and the ordeal she endured at Harvard over viewpoint diversity. Here’s a clip of Carole talking about how T affects crying:

And Coleman, by the way, was one of the first guests on the Dishcast. On another episode:

I have listened to your discussion with Charles Murray three times. It’s reached me at a very important moment in my life. I’m 37 and dealing with some extremely serious health issues. There are some strong indicators of a very unfavorable diagnosis. But, for this moment, nothing is conclusive and I am living in the realm of the possible.

I will keep this note short for now, but you may well hear from me again. For now I just want to say thank you.

A new reader just discovered a 2023 column of mine, “The Queers Versus the Homosexuals”:

Your article brought me to tears, and I thank you for it. I’m in my late 30s, grew up in West Hollywood, and have been openly gay since 16 … until I was 32. That year, I was struggling with my mental health and (consequently) decided to transition to female. Today, I am in the early stages of detransitioning in Portland, OR, and as you can imagine, I have thoughts.

Over the last seven years, I have watched my gay community disappear, and for a long time I just assumed that I no longer fit into those spaces. Through retrospective and discussions with other trans people, mostly MtFs, I have come to believe that my community was being erased. It wasn’t me.

My anger started on Grindr.

Even though I was on there as MtF, I had been using the app since beta, back in my WeHo days where you could be your nude gay self, cruising your community; that’s literally what it’s for. But by the time I transitioned, not only did I see gay men complaining online about “NO MEN” users, but I was also being hit on by cisgender women. What? “Queer” M/F couples (read: straight, sexually) were hitting on me as well. It’s always the same:

“Hey we are looking for our unicorn. My wife loves to watch or get used by us both.”

I would reply, “I don’t like women, sorry…” because trying to explain Grindr as an app for penis (at a minimum) only led to fights with strangers.

But they reply, I shit you not: “What do you mean? You have a cock.”

“I don’t like vaginas. I grew up gay; I like men.”

Then per usual, they say something to label me as close-minded. If I say it to a trans man or post-op trans female, the reaction is worse: I’m a bigot.

And so I became lonely. Lonely even though I looked the part. Men wanted me — straight men, and “queer” or non-binary men. It was only affirming for a while. In an actual relationship, it was terrible — so foreign on both sides.

Because I was so alone, yet so surrounded, I began coping: fetish, hooking up, and living like nothing mattered. And when that made me sad, I turned to food and got fat. When I could no longer date these queer and straight men, I tried to commit suicide. Actually tried. I was found out of sheer luck; a person worried about me, figured it out, and my cul-de-sac was flooded with emergency vehicles.

Then I was diagnosed with a personality disorder. Thankfully, my therapist was a gay man not much younger than me, so I could finally, actually, have a real talk. I was sick of feeling hatred for my own trans community. Sick of having no gay space to be in. I agree with you when you say it’s erasure. I obviously can’t be both gay and trans, and all the young people “getting gay” with each other can’t stand me when I tell that that I was beat up for being gay, oppressed, and called “queer” as a slur. Being mad about it only put me in a deeper hole.

I felt … not preyed upon, but ushered into a cult-like, political hive mind. I was 32 and needed a therapist, not a late “trans egg.” But being in the USA, in one of the biggest queer cities out there, means that I got hormones within one week of first learning the word “transgender.” It took me only 48 hours for Kaiser Permanente to fill my prescription.

I would never have done this if I had been given the infrastructure to ask real questions. The “Gender Pathways” department within Kaiser is a shuttle to a young, uneducated, and unwavering modality that shuns all discourse challenging the ideas at all. It’s so infuriating, and I’ve cried so much this last decade.

However, I am lucky to be super adamant about choosing good mental health and well-being. I am lucky to be off the Internet, where my identity is turned into literal fandom. I am lucky that my suicide attempt got me actual help from NEUTRAL parties, versus the queer FtM I was assigned to. Imagine trying to talk about your life and the difficulties of being the only trans woman you know who was gay before transitioning. I have yet to meet another of my archetype, so imagine trying to talk seriously to a female-born queer therapist who dates other people with vaginas. Man, oh man.

I had already started this process before finding your article, but it gave me the validation to know I’m not alone, broken, or hateful. I have sold my house to pay for this body, sacrificed all my funds, lost family and half my friends, and God do I feel foolish and upset. I can only pray that one day I can go back to the gay bars and men’s groups and focus on my actual goals: health, happiness, and a loving relationship with a man who sees me eye to eye, as their counterpart, and familiar. Someone who can say, “I’m sorry this happened to you, and your mistakes don’t define you.”

If you ever want to know more about this experience, I’d be happy to have a real conversation. Either way, thank you again.

Let me absorb this email for a bit. I do think the last ten years have been about the erasing and re-marginalizing of gay men and lesbians by queers and trans activists. The bubble of queer media and the academy and the entire queer elite infrastructure weighs heavily on men and women who just want to pursue their gay and lesbian relationships, and live their lives.

I got a message from Grindr last week asking me to fill out a questionnaire. In it, they asked me if there were any new categories I’d like Grindr to include in their profiles — “tribes”, dating preferences, relationship goals, etc. — and all I could think was: the one category I would like to screen for on an app for gay sex and dating is one that distinguishes between men and women because I’m a fucking homosexual. And they won’t. On a gay sex app, you cannot screen for sex. That’s how insane this ideology is.

This next reader quotes another piece of mine:

“The gender queers don’t want this, because their goal is to abolish the use of sex in law and culture.“ I have to say, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Perhaps, the problem is that we’re not using words the same way.

I think it’s generally accepted in the medical establishment that “sex“ refers to a biological distinction between people who are male (generally people who have XY chromosomes), female (generally people who have XX chromosomes), and intersex (generally people who have other variations of these chromosomes). It’s a distinction that is meaningful for medical treatment and, sometimes, for the accuracy of medical studies.

Not everyone who believes themselves to be “male“ is actually a biological male. Not everyone who believes themselves to be “female“ is an actual biological female. The role of hormones can change the way a person’s outward genitalia manifest. If you were to test the chromosomes of a random sample of people, there would be some number — maybe a tenth of a percent — who would be surprised to find out what their actual biological sex is. Other people are born with ambiguous genitalia and are assigned a sex at birth that may not correspond to their chromosomal status.

Understandably, this information is private. Nobody (except the person’s doctor or a medical researcher) needs to know what a person’s actual biological sex is, especially when it differs from the way that person has been identified since birth.

Nonetheless, sex is real. It’s just not particularly pertinent to what people actually mean when they put an M or an F on their passport or drivers license. “Gender” is the thing we usually mean by those designations. It is primarily the way that people identify themselves within their own being. Secondarily, it’s the way that they present themselves to the world socially. Gender is the thing that we care about when we try to categorize people. It means a great deal more than what clothes a person chooses to wear. It is about who people know themselves to be.

Like sex, gender is real. It is not a delusion. It usually corresponds to sex, but not always. People have known this since antiquity. There have always been people who have recognized themselves internally to be a gender that is different from their sex.

Among the transgender people I know and work with, what they most want is to be left alone and allowed to live their lives as they are. They have no interest in abolishing the reality of sex. They recognize that their lives would be somewhat easier if more people understood that there is a difference between sex and gender, but such knowledge and awareness is not necessary. The only thing that is necessary for them is that people stop insisting that they be something they are not.

And again, I have to come back to the question: why does anyone care about this, anyway? What possible harm is there in acknowledging people’s gender identity? Even if you don’t accept the distinction between sex and gender that I’ve tried to describe, how does it affect you? What inclination in people’s minds makes it so imperative to them that they define for other people who they are?

Seriously, no. The overwhelming majority of humans know what men and women are, and have no need of this postmodern “gender” category at all. A tiny group of humanity has a deep internal conflict about this and believe they are the opposite sex. It is insane to extrapolate from that incredibly rare experience anything about then human condition in general. But that is what the queers want: they want to force everyone else on the planet to be them. They’ve come up with this gender crap out of narcissistic need.

What the transqueer movement is about is exactly this: a totalitarian abolition of sex as a category in law and society, its replacement with gender, and a redefinition of gender to mean virtually anything at all. Of course most actual transgender people don’t want to force everyone on earth to deny reality — but those representing them do. And harm? How many children have to be mutilated, how many women assaulted, how many lies told to keep this fantasy alive? Enough.

On last week’s column — “Dick Cheney: The Trump Before Trump” — a reader writes:

Thank you for reminding me of how awful Cheney was. It was truly remarkable that his passing was not met with much fanfare. Everyone I know had the same reaction — that he somehow had become quaint! But he really was Darth Vader.

Another reader:

Thank you for reminding me about the worst of Cheney’s political failures. The Bush administration came when I was a child, so its issues are rarely top of mind. While I felt some admiration for the man who did (belatedly) turn out against Trump, I forgot that Cheney had initially supported Trump.

Another writes, “Somebody needed to say that — and you’re at your best when righteous anger has stood the test of time without cooling.” And another:

That column was brutal, but justified. The unitary executive line runs directly from Cheney to Vought.

I was more respectful of Cheney’s pre-2001 career. I gather that was a mistake. Clearly he went way overboard after 9/11 — whether out of guilt or who knows what. I didn’t know he was always a shoot-first guy.

Call me naive, but I’ll still give him credit for a deathbed conversion of sorts after January 6. No reason why he had to say anything at that point: it gained him zilch, it seems, and cost him his connections. Well, check that: he was already yesterday’s news by the time Trump came along, and news that the GOP wanted to forget. I’m sure he never lost the neocon faith in intervention.

A quick note on the 2024 election:

And yet Kamala embraced Cheney and his daughter on the campaign trail in some of the battleground states. What genius thought this was a good idea?

One more on the column:

Good one, Andrew. Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of Bush-Cheney nostalgia — or really, amnesia. People are so (rightly) outraged by Trump’s personality that they forget how the deeds of the Bush-Cheney administration were much worse. But there’s still time …

Another writes, “Your description of Trump is precise, but what makes it more chilling is that he’s scandal-proof”:

His vices are already absorbed into his mythos, part of the brand architecture. The public no longer punishes indecency; it rewards audacity. The deeper problem is structural. Our technological and media ecosystem now perfectly maps onto populism: outrage-driven, personality-based, algorithmically amplified. The system doesn’t just allow figures like Trump to rise; it optimizes for them.

Trump was the prototype. The next one will be more disciplined, more strategic, and far more dangerous. The same dynamic is visible everywhere: Musk in tech, Owens atop the podcast charts. The incentives are aligned toward dominance by the loudest and least restrained. That’s what’s truly frightening: not that Trump happened, but that the system keeps proving it should.

Another reader has a suggestion:

Thanks as always for the incredible work; it’s been a joy to continue reading you since your move to Substack, and the weekly cadence is a nice reminder of simpler, slower times. That said, the one thing I miss from the old, 24/7, Daily Dish days is the Sunday posts focused on religion and spirituality. Your writing and curation of religious content has been important in my spiritual journey — keeping the flame burning while watching so many of my Catholic friends and family wander away from the Church over the years.

You do a great job keeping this alive in your newsletters (as well as on the podcast, to my great delight), but I know there are many readers who dislike this religiosity and I feel at times you hold some of this back. Would you consider some infrequent posts that wholeheartedly embrace the Catholic/religious? You could even add a cheeky trigger warning for the lost souls that seem so bothered by any discussion of the divine.

I’ve been pushing it. But as I grapple with the book, some entirely religious or theological content may crop up more and more. I hope to use the Dishcast to explore Christianity more deeply — as I have tried to do for years.

Lastly this week, here’s “a fellow Brit and Washingtonian (well we actually live in McLean, so I guess technically a Virginian)”:

My wife and I were recently in London where I worked, in The City, for most of the 1980s and 1990s post-university (LSE). We sat in a City pub enjoying a pint when I noticed the following metal print on the wall …

Southdown and East Grinstead Breweries! It was probably long gone before you could drink, perhaps even you were born, but it still might conjure up memories from your hometown.

Also, I have an idea for how the Dish might generate more revenue. Why don’t you shorten the free episode of your Dishcasts? Not sure how long one gets for free these days (I am a paid subscriber), but if it’s 50%, drop it to, say, 30%. See what happens! Experiment! Your casts are long, so many may have heard enough at 50%, but I suspect at 30%, they will be hungry for more. You can experiment — 20%, 30%, etc. — and see what moves the dial.

The Dish is a gem, but it’s not free to create. Everyone should contribute! To slightly alter one of the Marxist battle slogans of my youth: “From each according to his desire to pay, to each according to his willingness to pay (for damn great content).”

Good idea. One of the things about the Weekly Dish, however, is that I’m not super-interested in growing it. I don’t want to be Bari, and never have. We’re still super-cheap at $5 a month, and we give a lot of content away for free, and don’t have any ads, because freedom and integrity are more important to me than money and marketing. All the same, I’m amazed how many people I come across who are devotees of the thing and have never given us a cent. We may try and prod a few more.

Thanks as always for the emails, especially the dissents, and you can send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com. See you next Friday.

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