Transcript: Martin Wolf and Fiona Hill on Democracy’s Year of Peril

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Martin Wolf and Fiona Hill on Democracy’s Year of Peril’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. It’s Marc Filippino here. Regular listeners will know that for every Sunday this month, the News Briefing is going to do something a little bit different. We’re running a series about the outlook for democracy hosted by the FT’s chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf. He’s been talking to leading political thinkers about what this year, a pivotal year for democracy, has in store for the liberal democratic system. So here goes, Martin Wolf, Democracy’s Year of Peril.

Martin Wolf
I’m Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, and you’re listening to episode four of Democracy’s Year of Peril. My last guest in the series is one of the world’s leading experts on Russian geopolitics. In this year of elections, Russia too held a presidential contest. But it was far from what we would regard as a democratic exercise.

[Audio clip of Vladimir Putin talking in Russian]

Martin Wolf
Vladimir Putin has returned to office after brutally eliminating all his competition with 88 per cent of the vote.

[Audio clip of Vladimir Putin talking in Russian]

And Russian interference in the other elections around the world, obscuring political fact from fiction, is a growing danger facing democracies.

[Audio clip of Putin supporters cheering]

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She’s also a miner’s daughter from the north-east of England, who’s gone on to be a foreign policy adviser on Russian and European affairs to three US presidents.

Fiona Hill
I’ve had a couple of stints in the US government, first as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the end of the George W Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama administration. And then, perhaps most notoriously, I probably would have to say, had a period in the Trump administration as the deputy assistant to the president and senior director for Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council, and left one week before the infamous phone call between President Trump and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. And the rest as they say is history.

Adam Schiff voice clip
Committee will come to order. Good morning everyone. This is the seventh in a series of public hearings the committee will be holding as part of the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry . . .

Martin Wolf
That history encompasses a moment when she was the subject of headlines worldwide after being summoned to testify in President Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2019.

Fiona Hill
Mr Chairman, ranking member Nunes and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify before you today. I appreciate the importance of Congress’s impeachment inquiry, and I’m appearing today as a fact witness in order to answer your questions about what I saw, what I did, what I knew and what I know with regard to the subjects of your inquiry.

Martin Wolf
Fiona Hill is also the chancellor of Britain’s Durham University, and has written about her personal and professional trajectory in her book, There’s Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century. But her journey to becoming one of the world’s most notable Russia experts started with a bit of good luck.

Fiona Hill
Timing was absolutely everything because I decided to study Russian just as Mikhail Gorbachev was coming into office in the Soviet Union, transforming not just the Soviet Union, but the relationships with the west.

Martin Wolf
Having lived in both Moscow and Washington, she’s able to bring into sharp focus how events in both countries have pushed against and sometimes trampled on the guardrails of democracy. We started our conversation with her juxtaposing two moments in history, the first Russian, the second American, and what they show us about the potential of elected leaders to corrupt the systems that appointed them.

Fiona Hill
The first for me was really in October 1993, when President Boris Yeltsin bombed what was called the Russian White House, which was actually the Russian parliament building, in a dispute about the passage of a new Russian constitution. And the debate had really been about the checks and balances in the system in Russia. And this is only two or three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the very nascent phases of a new post-Soviet Russia. So the constitution and the whole constitutional process was pretty critical. And the question was whether you would have a new set of arrangements in Russia that would put more weight on checks and balances in a parliamentary system, which throughout Russian history had been quite fraught because the parliament wanted to have an empowered vice-president in the system as well. So not just a president. In addition, then, to having much more of a parliamentary based cabinet system. So more of a sort of chief executive function and parliament having a lot more rights than the presidency.

And Boris Yeltsin at this particular point, was very much focused on his own personal power, although people were perhaps not realising that at the time, and thinking about creating a very top down system where the presidency looks very much like an American presidency in many facts or the French presidency. And the whole process of debate breaks down completely, and we end up with a situation in which Yeltsin calls out the troops against the parliament. People are holed up in the parliament and then shelled on. And basically, that’s how Yeltsin resolves this constitutional crisis by shelling the Russian parliament.

We fast forward into the period with Donald Trump and the first impeachment trial. We have Trump himself. And I saw this up close by being in the Trump administration for two and a half years, who starts to think of himself, and we’re seeing this playing out around us at this very moment with debates in the US Supreme Court about the impunity or otherwise of American presidents, the nature of checks and balances in the system. And in this kind of period in 2019, Trump’s already trying to think about how he strengthens the presidency, not just strengthens the presidency, but how he stays in the presidency for as long as possible. And the first impeachment trial was, of course, triggered off by what I alluded to before, this infamous phone call where Trump tries to get President Zelenskyy of Ukraine to, in effect, open up an investigation into the person who was going to be the main competitor in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, because of, you know, the activities of his son in commercial sector in Ukraine. And the whole essence of that first impeachment was whether a president could be held to account for transgressions in foreign policy or any other issues, and whether parliament, in the form of the Congress, would have basically the right to not just impeach, but to constrain the presidency, how that was basically thought about in the constitutional context. This was a constitutional crisis as well, and it continues to be, for the United States. And so for me, both of those lessons are about how individuals who are concerned about their own power and trying to strengthen the position that they sit in try to erode the checks and balances in the system.

And in Russia, what Yeltsin did set off a whole sequence of events that ultimately, you know, within the end of that decade of the 1990s, when Yeltsin selects Vladimir Putin as his successor in the presidency, he has set off a process in which Vladimir Putin can take hold of all of the reins of power. Putin gets rid of basically any kind of independence of parliament of the Russian Duma over time. He gets rid of political parties, essentially turning them into a kind of toothless movements. And then you start to see the same thing happening with Donald Trump here in the United States. By the time we get to that first impeachment trial, the Republican Party is no longer acting like a party, but a more as a kind of a rubber stamp movement in the fervour of Donald Trump, who has in many respects kind of hijacked the whole process.

So for me, those are actually twin threats to democracy, and they’re kind of reflective of each other, but in two very different places. Might have been something one might expect in a Russian context. But, you know, personally, coming here to the United States in 1989, I would never have expected to see it here.

Martin Wolf
Before I proceed with the American case, let’s just step back a moment since your a great expert on international relations in the global context. We’re seeing a rise of what is sometimes called strongmen, would-be autocrats, actual autocrats all over the world. We’re having also a year of elections in which some of these people are likely to do very well, but sometimes they seem to lose power. This happened in Poland recently. How would you place what’s going on in America? You’ve already mentioned Russia in this broader global context. Do you feel that we are watching essentially the global defeat of democracy?

Fiona Hill
I think we’re certainly witnessing an enormous challenge to global democracy, but I’m not sure whether actually we’re witnessing as yet the actual defeat, because you’ve just referenced that there’s been some changes in direction in places like Poland, for example. We’ve also seen, in the case of Germany quite recently, the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland on the right, but also far-left movements stirring up the political system, getting a lot of traction, particularly in disaffected regions like the former east of Germany, pushing issues like migration to the fore. But at the same time, when the Alternative für Deutschland party purportedly had a retreat, actually in the same kind of places, the Nazi Party had their retreats and talks about the expulsion of immigrants from Germany, it got a massive reaction in response. You had a million people out on the streets in Germany protesting this in the depths of winter. Again, something of an unexpected organisation.

A lot of the debates that are happening around free speech in the United States as turmoil on US campuses at the moment, which, you know, some people are depicting in one way, but it can also be seen as a rearguard and other protest action and furthermore, free speech, more democracy, more having a voice in the system by people who feel like they’re being left out of it. You’re getting a lot of debates in, many countries, the United Kingdom and other European countries about the nature of political parties, questions about whether we should see electoral reform. Smaller countries have been, you know, dealing with this in very different ways, is really kind of focusing on the way that the systems are organising themselves, and Scandinavian and other countries.

And look in even in places where, you know, we might have thought that strongmen, classic strongmen have already entrenched themselves, for example, in Turkey with President Erdoğan, we saw a very different outcome in recent municipal elections to what one would have anticipated. Erdoğan wasn’t able to completely shape the landscape. I mean, I have colleagues here at Brookings looking at the way that once, for example, Meloni has come into power in Italy. She has been ruling or ruling was actually what we thought that she would be doing, given the fascist antecedents of the party that she presides over. But let’s just say governing in a very different way, because the electorate is less radical and less leaning towards the right than one might have expected. And in fact, the, southern Italians didn’t actually vote in large numbers in the previous election. So the mandate for this right-wing party is far less than the mandate for previous parties or previous coalitions.

So sometimes these developments happen by default if opposition movements are not particularly well-organised. But it also shows that there’s all kinds of other sentiment and viewpoints that can kind of bubble up. And if they kind of coalesce, can push things in a different direction. So I think there’s no question that we have massive challenges here, but I think it’s still for me, and at least the jury’s out as to whether this is necessarily the defeat of democracy. And I think there’s a lot of behind the scenes in Russia. Putin isn’t an as unassailable person as he might seem if we think about his recent plebiscite to reaffirm his presidency in Russia, where he got 88 per cent of the vote. The highest he’s ever got since 2000. But behind that, there was no competition. There was his only real competitor Alexei Navalny, of course, died in a Siberian prison a month before the election. Anybody who ran against him was pretty marginal or marginalised. And we know that there’s a lot of dissent because we’ve had a million plus people leaving Russia because of the war in Ukraine. But we also see more apathy than anything else. And, you know, if we think back to a year ago when we saw a mutiny and insurgency by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group, what was really notable there was the lack of reaction of the population, either in support of Prigozhin himself or certainly also in support of Putin, which goes to show that not all is well for that particular strongman, just as it wasn’t necessarily for President Erdoğan in the case of Turkey.

Martin Wolf
Let’s talk a bit now about America and its prospects. You referred to the guardrails here, particularly the division of powers, Congress and, of course, the judiciary. Some of us have been very surprised that Trump has got away with it so far, and that it’s been so difficult to stand up, to me, pretty well obvious point that no political leader in a democracy can actually be above the law. That hasn’t been accepted since Magna Carta, as it were. So do you think that the absolutely central constraining institutions of the American constitution, namely Congress and the courts, pretty obvious, have basically just failed?

Fiona Hill
I think Congress has failed, in all honesty. I mean, I felt that when I was a witness in that first impeachment trial. To many people that was a game, I would say actually on both sides of the aisle at that particular point, but absolutely, especially for the Republicans who are participating in this. And I was quite shocked by it because it was almost as if they’d just willingly ceded their own positions and maybe even, you know, wilfully and also without any kind of particular regard for their place in the political system. And I found it quite shocking at the time. I mean, I think, you know, obviously the Democrats were in a different place, but they were also seeing it as something as part of the typical political sparring between the parties, as one might see in the UK parliament, you know, for example, of a question time or something like this.

But as time went on, of course, it became very clear that this was incredibly serious and not a game at all, because we have the insurrection of January 6th and Trump’s attempts, just like Putin and others, to stay in power for as long as he possibly can and to pervert the entire system. A self-coup in so many respects that all plays out and then people wake up to the seriousness of that, but not in the hall of Congress. So, you know, the members of the Republican Party in Congress who were opposed, well, as they leave, they don’t kind of stir to fight on. And the Congress and the Senate, we’ve seen mass defections over time. So Congress, I don’t think, is where anyone’s going to be saved or democracy is going to be saved.

The courts are something different. The Supreme Court is also rather problematic. Certainly, I’m not a constitutional scholar. I’m not a great expert on the Supreme Court. But, you know, I’ve lived in the United States an awfully long time, and I never saw the Supreme Court as politicised until recently. And now I worry greatly about whether members of this particular Supreme Court will be able to stand back from either ideological positions or even the political affiliations, which in some cases are pretty obvious and be able to sort of think about the longer-term health of US democracy. But beyond that, I think what is the really decisive elements and, of course, Supreme Court is pretty consequential, are the court systems, the legal systems in the states. And where we’re seeing Donald Trump the most bogged down and constrained is in New York. New York State, for example, or in the state of Georgia or in other states where he and his enablers, you know, basically try to pervert the course of the elections by coming up with slates of false electors in the Electoral College, et cetera, are outright trying to manipulate the vote count.

The other thing that I do think also plays for the future is the relationship among and between the US individual states and the states on the federal government, because one question that I have, and I haven’t had anybody really satisfactorily answer this for me, is if Trump really did pull a Putin or Erdoğan or, you know, Xi and really do what he says he’s going to do in terms of taking control of the federal government, and in fact, reducing the size of the federal government, kicking out long-term serving public servants and then turning it into a patronage network. He can’t do that at the state level or the municipal level. So what happens? I mean, America, maybe as a federal state, disintegrates in effect. Or what happens, you know, on a kind of on a legal basis? How does federal law or the kind of federal government exert itself if you’ve got a drastically reduced federal government and federal legal system? I mean, there are obviously things that the president can do, but do we go back to earlier times in American history where the states start to push back? I mean, there are still these divisions among the states that look like the old divisions from the Civil War between north and south but they’re not that neat because there’s been massive and dramatic demographic change. I live in the state of Maryland. I wonder, you know, how Maryland itself, as a state, you know, functions and moves forward if you have, you know, what’s essentially a hostile federal government just, you know, kind of across the nonexistent border in Washington, DC, or how DC, which is a quasi state and not actually a state, then interacts also with Trumpian, you know, diminished and very much weaponised federal government.

So there’s all these questions to me, that America’s really taking itself in a very radical direction, goes back to the past and into a very uncertain future.

Martin Wolf
So think about this election. Would you expect that if Trump lost, he would accept that?

Fiona Hill
I can’t see how he will. I mean, he hasn’t accepted the last loss.

Martin Wolf
Exactly.

Fiona Hill
Yeah. He keeps on stirring things up. And I think it becomes, it’s not that everybody will be breathing a sigh of relief if Biden is re-elected, because I think just what you just said there, there’s going to be several things that are going to be extraordinarily difficult to manage. There’s going to be that the lack of acceptance of yet another defeat and the sense, again, that the United States system seems rigged in the way that Trump keeps saying. There’s also going to be the problem of generational change within the Democratic Party. And I think back, and this score to Russia, the period in the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin, you know, essentially had literally run out of his natural term, if not his electoral term. You’ll recall this as well. He essentially died during the 1996 presidential election, and he’d been revived. His heart was in terrible shape, and although he lived much, much longer than expected, they basically needed to move him off the presidential throne in Russia and find a successor. And then there was this whole period, Operation Successor, that it was literally called that, that went on for several years and testing out various different prime ministers and deputy prime ministers to see who would safeguard Yeltsin, the people around him, his interests. And they came up with Vladimir Putin, who was told to take care of Russia but is really taking care of himself and, you know, a whole lot of other issues as well.

What happens in a very different setting, of course, in the inside of the Democratic Party, about figuring out what happens over the next four years when you have Biden, who will be, you know, way beyond what anybody would have expected in terms of age as a president and really serious questions as we have all the time and these long incumbencies in the Senate in the United States, about whether he dies in office (inaudible) or becomes incapacitated in some way. Do you bring in a new generation? There will be a lot of, you know, basically machinations around that on top of having, you know, these radicalised groups on the outside who do not accept a defeat. So there’s no, at this particular moment, there’s no reason to breathe a big sigh of relief if you see Biden re-elected because the hard work continues. It’s not something that’s just begun but the hard work continues of figuring out what I feel is a kind of a full-blown constitutional crisis in the United States.

Martin Wolf
Could there be a civil war?

Fiona Hill
I think in many respects, you’ve already got a lot of communal violence. I keep thinking this through myself. I mean, I’ve heard colleagues talk about a cold civil war, but I wonder myself we’ve been in that certainly a soft secession of the states. We’ve already seen them, but we’re there already. You don’t have uniform rights and regulations across states in America, which seems preposterous for any other country. I mean, it’s not just about abortions and guns, you know, but all kinds of licensing of anything from being a hairdresser to, you know, a kind of a plumber, let alone a doctor, a lawyer, where people have to be licensed from state to state. But it’s now becoming educational systems are going to be different. Access to books, you know, everything that you can kind of think of is turned on its head in terms of a unified space that Americans are operating under.

And then we’ve got already all kinds of communal violence because of just the sheer preponderance of guns here in America. So anyone who’s disaffected, they don’t have to be in a large, organised group, can basically go out and commit an act of unspeakable violence. So this, I think, is also a big challenge for America. America no longer has and hasn’t had for a very long time as a state, a monopoly on violence. And that, in fact, if we start to think about all of the political philosophies, ideas of the essence of a state is that states really start when they have monopolies over political violence, and the United States has not had a monopoly on political violence for a very long time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Martin Wolf
So let’s just finally look at what this means for the world. So the United States is the linchpin of what used to be called the free world, maybe called the world of liberal democracy. It’s the world’s most important economic power. There is a huge alliance systems. It is engaged increasingly in a competition with China, a rising authoritarian superpower. We have a very major fighting war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine with a revanchist Russia. We have now a very significant war in the Middle East. Now we suddenly inject into this the prospect of a Trump presidency, or alternatively, just a very, very weak presidency. But to focus on the former, you know what it’s like to work with Donald Trump. You’ve seen it. What would a Trump II, a second Trump administration mean for its allies, for its enemies, for the world, for its stability? He’s made some extraordinary threats already about destroying trade. What does it mean?

Fiona Hill
Well, on the trade front, I think it’s fairly clear. I don’t think it necessarily means to destroy trade, but it’s certainly a protectionist system. And I think, you know, people want to get a really clear idea of that. Just read and listen to Bob Lighthizer, who is a very articulate and, you know, a very clear proponent of the kinds of trade and other economic policies that we would likely to see. I think that’s more likely to be most rational and clear in a part of the whole portfolio of a Trump presidency.

Everything else comes down to capriciousness, to be frank. I mean, there are a lot of people out there who are trying to be the ideologues of the Trump system. But it’s not that Trump is likely to listen to them. He’s much more likely to go, as he always does, with his gut or what he thinks, you know, would really suit himself, both domestically and in the foreign policy arena, has some very clear ideas, and he’s obviously going to play with issues related to immigration. He’s, you know, playing the kind of classic, what you yourself described as plutocratic populism. You know, very much the system set up for the wealthy, those that he favours. Of course, not those that he might be in opposition to. It’s all, again, very much all about in himself and extensions of the things that he thinks about.

But look, I think the broader message is this: never count the United States out because there is always a way the United States has had plenty of periods of upheaval in the past. And it’s worked them out in many respects. You know, this is a constantly revolutionary country. Now, this is a kind of a revolution right now as a result of a constitutional crisis that will come out somewhere, and it could still come out in a way that actually would put the United States in a very different and more positive footing than, you know, the way we would be describing it at present.

But I think the message for everyone else out there in the world is to start thinking about self-organisation. They should have been thinking about this during the first Trump presidency. I think the message from all of the prevarication and dithering around about the supplemental bill for Ukraine, for example, is a message don’t count on the United States, for the Ukrainians, for Europe and for other allies and partners, for Nato and, you know, more broadly Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, for example. You know, try to basically build up your own capacities, which Europe is now talking about belatedly. You know, when I was in government, I was suggesting to them earlier on that they should. If you think back to Barack Obama’s presidency and the famous summit that Nato had in Wales, Barack Obama and Robert Gates, who was then his secretary of defence, as he had previously been George W Bush’s secretary of defence, basically telling Europeans, step up, start paying for your own security and start paying more attention to this. I mean, years have elapsed in that time in a more than a decade. So, you know, people have fallen behind that curve very much now as well. That was the message. That’s the message that has been coming out the United States for an extraordinary long time, even before Obama. Maybe masked because of 9/11 and the United States’ forays into Afghanistan and then into Iraq. But the message from the United States has been somewhat loud and clear: that Europe and other allies and partners were going to have to do more and to think more actively about their role in the world and how they were going to take that forward.

Look, for the United States’ enemies, I mean, it was, I was saying with the partners need to start thinking about their own resilience, their own resolve and making their own security arrangements. That gives the United States a chance to be part of that later on. But, you know, that’s while the United States is, let’s just say, you know, closed for solitary repair, perhaps it might be worthwhile moving on. But for enemies, I think it’s going to be something of a question because Trump is extraordinarily capricious. You know, he can flip on a dial about how he thinks about individuals and countries. It’s really more about individuals and fellow strongmen. And he gets along, so he thinks, with people like Putin and with Xi. You know, so if they’re in the enemy category. So you’re not with Iranian mullahs like Ayatollah Khamenei. How many of you know this, for example. But certainly people who likes to think that he is like, he likes to think of himself as this, you know, major international strongman figure. The Pope, the Queen used to fit into this category for him as a sort of international celebrities that have got respect and clout and name recognition everywhere. And those relationships to him are pretty critical. It’s not really about the countries. So, for example, with Russia and China, he was willing to take all kinds of rather aggressive steps behind the scenes, as long as he thought it didn’t affect his relationship with the main man. So there’s a complexity in this. You know, he did not stop the United States policy or really the sanctions from impacting Russia in ways that people might have anticipated because he wasn’t thinking about Russia, he was more thinking about what his interaction was going to be like with Putin. And as long as Putin was not insulting him but was praising him, he wanted to be, you know, seen in the company of Putin. Same with Xi. I mean, I think all of these leaders, particularly those who’ve been in power for so long and saw the first Trump presidency, know that as long as they praise him and they don’t in any way be seen to personally cross him know they can somewhat manipulate the relationship, but ultimately they might not get anything out of it that they particularly want to. He’s not that easy a person to actually deal with. He doesn’t necessarily follow through on things, and sometimes he can be extraordinarily ruthless. Barack Obama pulled back from shelling Syria despite setting up a redline during the Syrian civil war when they used chemical weapons and Trump didn’t want to do that. In fact, you know, there were many times where he wanted to take out Bashar al-Assad for crossing lines and transgressing. So again, he’s a mixed bag. He’s very unpredictable. He’s predictable in some ways, but in others he’s quite difficult for them to deal with. There’s the personal and then there’s the let’s just say, the kind of professional, all the issues that relates to larger bilateral relationships. And Trump doesn’t always think all of those through.

Martin Wolf
If you look at all this, do you feel that this year, which some has called the Year of Elections with this decisive one in it, that this might be one of those big turning points in world history, particularly with respect to the future of liberal democracy?

Fiona Hill
I think you’re absolutely right. I think that’s exactly what this is. I mean, it is really quite remarkable, isn’t it, to think about we’ve got 64 elections, something like that this year, about 4bn people, half of humanity. It’s hard to even think about 8bn people now, which is, you know, really quite shocking as well. And the United States is only about 4 per cent of that. And yet this election is probably going to be setting the tone. But then again, although it will set a tone at the top, it’s really these dynamics in other countries that really matter. You know, a country like India, so populous, where India itself can attempt just to change its own politics just by sheer weight of the population.

And, you know, in Russia itself there’s all these different dynamics. And, you know, one man, if you have a one-man system, the vertical of power in Russia and Putin falls off it, just accidentally dies, you know, as people tend to, that kind of shifts the whole thing as well. And in an age of strongmen, if the strongmen disappear, do the systems that they’ve created really stay intact. And, you know, history tells us all kinds of different things. So it is a very decisive, pivotal, period but I think we’re in for a lot of surprises ahead.

And, you know, even if Trump gets elected again and if it is as it was in 2016 with this tiny margin of just of tens of thousands or a couple of hundred thousand votes in the Electoral College, what do Americans then start to think about their own democracy? You know, is it just like in the United Kingdom? I mean, are 18th-century democratic systems fit for purpose in a 21st-century complicated world? So, you know, what would it be like? You know, not just one man trying to be a dictator for a day or whatever it is he’s saying is doing all these things he’s trying to do. But this will be you know, I can’t say what what it would be, but I mean, a few hundred thousand people deciding the vote and maybe, you know, 20 per cent or 25 per cent of the electorate, a very small minority rule in a country that is divided up into so many states with very different profiles and different weights. It’s not clear to me how that plays out, you know, over time.

Martin Wolf
Fiona Hill, thank you very much.

Fiona Hill
Thank you, Martin, thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Martin Wolf
The message from the first Trump presidency was that countries needed to develop their resilience. There’s no reason to think that in a theoretical second term, a man with no doctrine of his own, save America First, will come to the aid of the alliances that have been such an important element in US strategy since the second world war. The only thing that we can know about the next American election is that not only is its result unpredictable, but so, crucially, are the consequences. Moreover, this uncertainty is an important indicator of the danger to the system of liberal democracy that we in the west have taken for granted for decades.

I’m Martin Wolf, and you’ve been listening to the fourth in my podcast series on Democracy’s Year of Peril. It was produced by Sandra Kanthal. Production help from Sonja Hutson. The sound engineer was Nigel Appleton and the executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.