Fiona Hill referred to the United States as an unreliable partner in international relations during her talk at the University of Idaho Borah Symposium Monday night.
Hill, who has acquired a significant list of accolades, including a senior fellow in the Center of the United States and Europe within the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institute, a chancellor at Durham University, United Kingdom and a national intelligence officer at the National Intelligence Council, brought her uniquely qualified perspective to a fireside chat with University of Idaho Journalism professor Kenton Bird.
The accolade that has kept Hill in the spotlight during recent years is her time as a deputy assistant to the U.S. president and senior director of European and Russian affairs for the U.S. National Security Council under the Trump administration.
She referred to her time in the White House during the Trump era to explain the current state of the country from a global perspective. The symposium, titled “World on Edge: The Future of International Cooperation” stayed around the topic of reliability during Hill’s talk.
UI has held the Borah Symposium since 1948, bringing in speakers addressing current affairs, wars and relations to explain local impact in a global situation.
Hill addressed concerns about isolationist and nationalist perspectives procured during the Trump administration, and how those outlooks might affect the reputation of U.S., as well as its role in the Russia-Ukraine war.
She referred to the many accords that former President Trump pulled the U.S. from during his four-year administration.
“If the rest of the world thinks every time a new administration comes along, if we are going to tear up agreements we just made,” Hill said during the Monday night fireside chat. “Then we are not looked at as a reliable partner.”
“Can we rely on the United States? We are a weak link,” Hill continued.
She mentioned recent diplomatic appearances in places like India and Brazil, saying those encounters proved her theory on American unreliability true.
“It’s been sobering. They (the world) really don’t like us,” Hill said.
Although Hill criticized Trump specifically for the unreliability, Hill said many of the former president’s reliable actions were overlooked. She accredited the peace between North Korea and the U.S. to Trump. She said his personal “madman” approach might have been the only reason that a nuclear weapons episode avoided outbreak.
Trump’s personalization of foreign policy might have provoked some countries, but it calmed a potential nuclear storm brewing in North Korea. Hill said that after the Obama administration, the U.S. was in considerate nuclear peril, and Trump calmed that peril, a point many people forget.
Even though nuclear peril passed, unreliability crept into the global outlook on U.S. reputation, Hill said. She said international cooperation has proved its necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Technological advances are continuously gluing parts of the world. However, as the symposium is entitled, a little glue doesn’t take the world off the edge. It is still a world on edge, Hill said.
She said issues such as health pandemics, international wars and climate change prove that the world is at an inflexion point.
“We kind of seem to be stepping back instead of forward,” Hill said specifically of the U.S. “We are in a constitutional crisis. We are not headed toward one. We are in one.”
Because of potential domestic peril, Hill pushed away the narrative of isolation and emphasized the need for global reliance, to get the U.S. of the edge, to get the world of the edge.
“We just have to get over ourselves in the various fights we have to be able to address these issues,” Hill said.
Joanna Hayes can be reached at [email protected]