Fiona Hill warns ‘capricious’ Trump ‘will rip up every agreement that doesn’t have his name on it’

Former Trump adviser says US allies are doubting America’s reliability

The continued presence of Donald Trump on the US political scene has longtime allies concerned over whether the US can be a reliable security partner, former National Intelligence Officer and Trump administration National Security Council official Fiona Hill has said.

Speaking at the Principles First summit, a gathering of anti-Trump and pro-democracy conservatives in Washington, Ms Hill was asked to opine on how Mr Trump would have reacted to the killing of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny on his watch.

She told attendees the twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president, whose performance during a 2018 Helsinki press conference alongside Russian leader Vladimir Putin was so bad that she considered pulling a fire alarm to end it, might actually have reacted negatively to Navalny’s death if he thought it made him look bad.

“It's really about how it reflects on him,” she said.

Ms Hill, referencing conversations she’d had with leaders at the Munich Security Conference last week, said American allies in Europe have taken Mr Trump’s susceptibility to flattery and self-centredness to heart in their deliberations over what it could look like if the ex-president is returned to the White House after the 2024 general election.

“I had many conversations around the edges of the conference with prime ministers and presidents and foreign ministers and others in European countries. And they all know how capricious Trump is. And that's really what they worry about, because it doesn't matter how many people that they know who becomes Secretary of State or Secretary of Defence, ultimately it comes down to Trump himself and the unpredictability of his personality,” she said.

“And ... as a result of that [they’ve] started to lose faith in the United States. And we really saw that we've become the weak link”.

Continuing, Ms Hill warned that US allies “no longer think we’re predictable” because American voters were once willing — and may be willing again — to vote into power a “kind of ... uber-populist leader such as Mr Trump, who she said “will rip up every agreement that doesn't have his name on it”.

“In terms of our security guarantees for our partners, they no longer think that we can be relied upon. And Trump you know, of course, will rip up every agreement that doesn't have his name on it,” she said, adding later that we are now living in a “much more dangerous world” because Europeans are now reconsidering whether America’s “nuclear umbrella” of deterrence can be relied upon to prevent war.

“Not that they think that Trump's gonna press a button, but actually that they think that the United States is not going to play that role that it did in terms of nuclear deterrence in the past,” she said.

She was speaking on the second anniversary of Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as people across the world ralled in support of Ukraine.