Fiona Hill knows more than almost anyone just how fraught this geopolitical moment is. The British-born Russia expert not only served as an adviser to presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, she also sat on the US’s National Security Council until 2019. Later that year, she became a star witness in Congress’s impeachment inquiry over Trump’s relationship with Russia ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
More recently, as people scrambled for information in the immediate aftermath of the US’s strikes in Venezuela, a 2019 deposition resurfaced in which Hill detailed a “strange swap arrangement” that Russia was floating at the time. According to the proposal, Russia suggested it would cede its interests in Venezuela if the US would abandon Ukraine. Hill spoke to the New Statesman about that proposal, the return of the Monroe Doctrine and the prospect of a US attack on Europe.
Megan Gibson: Your 2019 deposition has gained a lot of attention in recent days. When you gave the deposition it was well before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but was the revelation of the swap proposal picked up on at the time?
Fiona Hill: It wasn’t really. That’s why it’s probably resonated in such a major way now, because people are looking back for explanations. What we have to do is cast ourselves back to that first Trump administration in 2019. You just had another election in Venezuela. Maduro had absolutely, clearly lost. At that point, the US was part of a much larger discussion about how to persuade Maduro to give up power, to leave and to put a coalition government to place that would then start that process of putting Venezuela on a different footing. There were a lot of European countries [involved], including the UK, Italy, Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil. There was a question about where Maduro would go, and that was certainly not off to the Southern District Court of New York. The idea was that like many former dictators, he’d find somewhere to go. In the midst of all of this there are also rumours spreading around that the US might basically try to topple Maduro.
The Russians had vested interests: they’d been using Venezuela as a launchpad for all kinds of disinformation in the Spanish language. They’re still playing up all these old leftist connections from the Soviet period, and there’s oil. So the Russians had specialists they put in place basically to help Maduro push back against the possibility of a US invasion.
Meanwhile, you’ve got some Russian officials basically saying, “Perhaps if [we left you to] focus on Venezuela, then you could basically butt out of whatever it is that you think you’re doing in Ukraine.” I had hints dropped – that nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of approach – by the Russian ambassador to the US at the time, Anatoly Antonov. But the proposal was not picked up at that point, even by people within the [first] Trump administration, because the people at the time who were interested in the demise of Maduro were not interested in doing a swap for Ukraine.
But was there anyone in the first administration who seemed especially intrigued by the prospect of a return to the Monroe Doctrine?
Well, there were certainly plenty of people talking about it. I would say that our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio – at that point he was in the Senate – was then making very strong comments about the importance of the US playing a more forceful role in its hemisphere. Now we seem to have gone back to an old role, or even an expansion of an old role of the US throwing its weight around. I’m not sure that’s really what, at the time, Rubio had in mind. But there certainly were plenty of people who wanted to see the end of Maduro. The Russians, of course, knew that, and they kept making all these comments about Cuba as well.
And now we see Trump is talking about attacking Cuba, as well as attacking Colombia and Mexico, and annexing Greenland. Were these countries part of the Russian conversation back then?
No, of course not. Greenland was already emerging as a fixation of Trump’s, but it wasn’t linked at that point to any larger idea of dominating the Western hemisphere. It was more about the risks of China muscling in. Look, the president is saying there’s all these ships from China and Russia around Greenland – no, there is not. Remember, Greenland is part of Nato and the US has had bases in Greenland since the 1950s. It [already] plays an important role in North Atlantic security, which is recognised by the Danes, by the Greenlanders themselves and Canada, Norway and the UK. Perhaps rudimentary fragments were there in that period around 2019 or so but they weren’t then taking the shape of: “I can do whatever I want in the Western hemisphere. It’s my domain.”
How concerned should the residents of Greenland – and Europe – be now?
They should be very concerned. You had Katie Miller – the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief adviser – putting out on X a picture of Greenland with the US map [overlaid]. Is this trolling? Obviously, but it’s also got some real menace behind it. It’s the kind of thing we expect from the Russians. It’s intimidation.
It all depends how this plays out in Venezuela. Spheres of influence might be all nice and neat and great for historians to talk about, but they rarely go uncontested. The US is not the overlord of every country in Latin and South America in the way that it might have been. Brazil is a major power, it’s got options. Other countries are not as weak as Venezuela is. Are Canadians really going to just go along with anything that is pushed upon them? We can see from recent events in Ukraine and elsewhere that when people are put under a lot of pressure, some of them decide to fight back.
Should we take Trump at his word that this is a return of the Monroe Doctrine and that he’s simply seizing command of his backyard? Could it be part of a wider attempt at asserting US supremacy?
I don’t think these things have to be mutually exclusive. The National Security Strategy makes things very clear that the Western hemisphere is now the focal point but what is our vision for the region other than: “We own this, and everyone else can keep out”? Now Europe is a secondary consideration and so is the Middle East. Everyone is at pains to say that China is still a major priority, which doesn’t suggest that leaving the whole of Asia to President Xi is entirely on the cards.
[But] there’s a whole wide world out there [to push back] – not just Brazil but India, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, all kinds of other countries that were not in the picture during the Cold War. This is a totally different place, the world we live in now, than it was 80 years ago, 40 years, 30 years, or even 20 years ago. It’s much more complicated, and I’m not so sure how much Trump is going to be able to throw his weight around.
His second term has recast a lot of thinking about Trump as an isolationist and what America First means exactly. Do his actions align with any recognisable doctrine? Or is it a mistake to think that he has one?
Well, there’s lots of people around him who have recognisable doctrines. But with Trump, it’s about him and it’s about his perceptions. A lot of this is personal whim. He is a pattern-breaker. That’s why he’s so successful, actually, because people expect all kinds of things from him and then he often does things they weren’t expecting at all.
He says he is America First – no, he’s himself first. Anywhere [he sees the opportunity to gain] some benefit for him and his own extended business interests, then you can be sure he’ll take it if he thinks he can get away with it. [So they] put pressure on Denmark, put pressure on Europeans because Europe doesn’t have any leverage. Wherever he can leverage something – and this is exactly what Putin and the Russians do – he will leverage it.
How much of this foreign policy comes down to Trump’s own pursuit of self-enrichment?
Oh, it’s a lot about that. And enrichment isn’t just in monetary terms. It’s in terms of the mantle of power and his own status. It’s about his ego, and renaming everything after him. I’m sure Venezuela will now have some new appendage attached to it [bearing Trump’s name].
So it’s his legacy?
I don’t think he’s really interested in legacy. He wants the accolades in real time because he won’t be around to enjoy them when he is dead. Putin and Xi are somewhat different because they see themselves as the inheritors of great history – millennia-long [history] in the case of China. For Trump, it is just Trump. He completely trashes every other American leader – he doesn’t have a good word for any of them.
Is China more likely to launch its own military operation in Taiwan after Venezuela? Does it figure at all into the calculation?
Well, it basically removes any moral high ground that the US – or anybody else, frankly, if they don’t push back against this – would have. The Russians already have made all these cases about Zelensky not being legitimate, for example, and [guilty of] all kinds of corruption. In the case of Taiwan, could we start to see some kind of manufacturing about rogue behaviour [to justify an invasion]? That might give them an excuse, but perhaps they don’t even need that. But [the Venezuela strike] removes the ability for others to push back against it.
The idea of spheres of influence where Russia looks after its patch, China has its patch and the US has the Western hemisphere – it leaves Europe a bit adrift…
It’s somebody else’s patch.
Exactly. But Marco Rubio has always been hawkish on China and Russia, and thus quite supportive of Taiwan and Europe compared to other figures in the administration – like JD Vance. Rubio seems to be ascendant within the administration at the moment, so how do you think he’ll influence these various geopolitical calculations?
It’s really hard to say. Rubio might be ascendant on this issue, but he certainly hasn’t been in the case of Ukraine or in the Middle East. [Latin America] is an issue that he is deeply familiar with. On the other issues – Europe, the larger geopolitical landscape – he’s extraordinarily well versed. But can he have that same impact? I’m not so sure.
And if the Russians are thinking of trade-offs, then you’ve got people like Vance and others who do not want to see any more support for Ukraine or Europe. You look at the people who helped put together that National Security Strategy: it doesn’t necessarily bode well for any kind of coherence here. What it does suggest is that it’s just gonna be this tug of war, all the time. If I were sitting in London and Europe, I’d be getting my own act together.
You helped write the UK’s Strategic Defence Review, so you have more insight than almost anyone on where Britain falls short. At the moment, how great of a concern are British capabilities?
They are of concern. And all of Europe and Canada is probably feeling quite discomforted at the moment as well. It was never a great idea: 80 years of the US dominating European security and everybody just basically acquiescing to that because they believed they were dealing with a benevolent country. It was always inevitable that the US at some point was going to say, enough.
So what we should be doing is really taking a long, hard look – as we tried to do in the Strategic Defence Review – at our own security position. Who is it that we should be working most closely with? In the review you will see there was a lot of advocation of focusing on the European security front. In the period that we were finishing it in March of last year, it was just prior to the whole blow-up at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, and there was still the idea that the US would remain a major bilateral partner. But this is a place that’s in a constant amount of flux. The UK, like other European neighbours, needs to re-engage with Canada, Denmark and Greenland and Norway, all the Scandinavian countries, [as part] of a multifaceted security realm in the North Atlantic, the North Sea, the northern part of Europe. The UK also has overseas interest and it has to take care of them as well.
But it has to do that in conjunction with others. It’s fair to say, and some people will disagree, but Brexit was a colossal mistake because it assumed a benign security environment. And I’m sorry, you could have foreseen these kinds of things happening. Making yourself entirely dependent on the US at a time when the world was changing dramatically was a strategic blunder. The world was changing [then] and it’s well and truly changed now. The UK will have to work very closely with its other allies to figure out how to address this, and we need a national conversation. It doesn’t mean [saying], “We’re gonna be under attack any second now from the Russians pouring over this border, land, sea, or air.” But we’re in a real predicament and we haven’t taken care of our critical national infrastructure. We also have to think about the informational and propaganda environment that we’re in: it’s informational warfare, which the Russians are winning all the time, and frankly, the United States is engaging now with the same degrees of hostile propaganda. The UK needs to think of its own sovereignty as other countries do.
Would you have liked to see a stronger initial reaction from European leaders and Keir Starmer to what happened in Venezuela?
[It’s important to make] it clear that there have been violations of international law and process here, and recognising that the UK and Europe and others cannot be complicit in this. Do they have to tread very carefully? Absolutely. And they better start thinking about what they are going to do about Panama. What about Greenland? What about Canada?
We also have to see what happens. There’s always a rush [to think] the world is ending here. I’m probably contributing to that somewhat by some of the things I’m laying out. But I’m going to pause here [to note that] the US doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It will get pushback. Some of that pushback could well come from the UK and other European allies, and Canada basically saying “no”. Everybody has agency. This is not going to be a linear triumphal march from Venezuela to [the US dominating] everything else.
Back to the idea of Russia and the US swapping Venezuela for Ukraine: if you are Zelensky at this moment, how worried should you be?
Pretty worried. But it seems to be more par for the course for poor Zelensky. There’s been all kinds of pressure on Ukraine [already] to give up territory. We’ve been dealing with all of that for the last several months, but it really does undercut the US as an honest broker. I think the Ukrainians were already quite aware of this. It just means we’re in a territory where the Russians double and triple down. Trump says all the time: “Ukraine’s a little country.” It’s not actually a little country, it’s a big country. But [in Trump’s mind] it belongs in the sphere of Russia, where might makes right.
This is an edited extract from a longer interview. Hear the full conversation on the New Statesman’s Daily Politics podcast, below.
[Further reading: America’s imperial fights are not necessarily ours]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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