Russia is at war with Britain and US no longer a reliable ally, UK adviser says

The Guardian

10 hours ago

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, and made the remarks in an interview with the Guardian.
'We're in pretty big trouble,' Hill says, 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 United States.
The best known of the reviewers appointed by Labour, alongside Lord Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, and retired general Sir Richard Barrons, Hill, 59, 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 even after living over 30 years in the US.
'Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn't fully anticipated,' Hill says, arguing that Putin sees 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 is already 'menacing the UK in various different ways,' she says, 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 says, is that 'Russia is at war with us'. Though the foreign policy expert, a long time Russia watcher, says she 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 says. At the time, other experts disagreed, but Hill says events since demonstrate '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 persuaded China, North Korea and Iran to join in'.
Putin believes, she says, that Ukraine has already been decoupled from the US relationship 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 comes to defence, however, Hill says that the UK cannot 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 even appears in the defence review published earlier this week, which says 'the UK's long-standing assumptions about global power balances and structures are no longer certain' – a rare acknowledgement 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 defence secretary John Healey. Most of Hill's interaction were with Healey however, and Hill said she only met the prime minister once – describing him as 'pretty charming … in a proper and correct way' and as 'having read all the papers'.
Hill is not drawn on if she 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 says 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 adds that unlike his close circle, Trump has 'a special affinity for the UK' based partly on his own family ties (his mother came from the Hebridean island of Lewis, emigrating to New York aged 18) and an admiration for the royal family, particularly the late Queen. 'He talked endlessly about that,' she says.
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.
Already, she notes, Reform UK won a string of council elections last month, including in her native Durham, and leader Nigel Farage wants 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 he wants to do a Doge against the local county council, he should come over here [to the US] and see what kind of impact that has,' she says. 'This is going to be the largest layoffs in US history happening all at once, much bigger than hits to steel works and coal mines.'
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 says, arguing that Britain needs to have 'a different mindset' based as much on traditional defence as on social resilience.
Some of that, Hill says, is 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 says.
Hill says she sees that deindustrialisation and a rise of inequality in Russia and the US has 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'.
If this seems far away from a conventional view of defence, that is 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,' Hill says. '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 recalls 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.'