Minter Dialogue with Karin von Hippel

In this episode, I sit down with Karin von Hippel, Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. We explore her extensive career in think tanks and foreign policy, including her work with the United Nations, the State Department, and the European Union. Karin shares insights into her early career, discussing her first job working on Somalia’s political options post-dictatorship. We delve into the concept of resilience in conflict zones and the importance of national service. Karin reflects on the challenges of geopolitics, the role of think tanks like RUSI, and the complexities of global security threats. We also discuss leadership qualities and the evolving nature of international relations. As Karin prepares to leave RUSI, she offers her perspective on the future of global politics and her own next steps. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation on leadership, resilience, and the intricate web of global affairs.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

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Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Karin von Hippel, you and I have known each other just a few years, and you’re not the first member of my class, of our class at Yale to be on my show, or had our mutual friend Adam Snow and Shelley Onderdonk not too long ago. But you are certainly probably the most distinguished member of our class on my show. And I’d love for you to describe in your own words, Karin, who are you today?

Karin von Hippel: Well, I’m not sure I would say I was any more distinguished than anybody else, including Adam and Shelley. But thank you for inviting me, mentor. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. I am the director of a think tank in London called the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). But I have spent most of my career working between think tanks, policy focused think tanks and foreign policy, and then working for institutions that implement policies. So whether that’s the United Nations, State Department, European Union. I’ve kind of gone back and forth between think tanks where you have time to think and write about big challenges and then institutions where you don’t have time to think about it. You’re just running around doing things. So that’s been most of my career, focused mostly on security, geopolitics, less on hardcore defense, which Rusi does as well.

Minter Dial: And how did you get into this? I mean, obviously you studied, you have your PhD, masters and so on, which you got in England. But what is it that got you interested in this zone of business?

Karin von Hippel: I don’t know. It’s a good question. I’ve always been interested in foreign policy, and I think when you’re young, you get a job or an opportunity, and often that can lead you in a certain direction, even if that may not have been what you intended. So my first job after my PhD was working on Somalia with a group of academics looking at what kind of decentralized political options Somalis could have when they were ready to rebuild the state. This is in the mid-nineties, and I was doing this at London School of Economics. So we had a lot of amazing conversations with Somalis from across the spectrum, inside the country and in the diaspora about federal state, decentralized unitary state, how do you organize yourself? They were very nervous about another authoritarian state after so many years of dictatorship under Sia Bari, which collapsed in 1991. And so it was really just more about debate, discussion about what these options would be and their views on it. So that was my first job, and that kind of got me into, you know, the conflict space, I suppose. And then I just thought it was fascinating. I’m impressed by resilience in people and all sorts of situations. So then I did some work later in Kosovo after the NATO bombing campaign when the UN was in charge, and I spent about a year there and then, you know, worked also, as mentioned, in think tanks here in the United States.

Minter Dial: So the funny thing is my daughter’s boyfriend has been studying security, and one of his thesis at university was about how do you make peace after war, especially in civil war, and how does that actually go down and the different forms and practices and obviously very difficult because there’s so much blood and hate that’s gone before and it’s very hard to reconcile. And obviously, every time differently, you talked about resilience and you’ve been in different situations. It’s my observation that as a society we seem to be lacking in resilience. I’m wondering, Karin, if you agree with that. And two, how does one gain resilience?

Karin von Hippel: That’s a good question, mentor. I think I’ve been looking at resilience conflict zones. So not in, you know, the United Kingdom of the United States, but it’s a good idea because actually I do worry about, you know, the elasticity, let’s just say how tightly strung out. The United States in particular is a country you know very well, I think you don’t ever know how you’ll act until you’re tested. And so we’ve seen this in different war zones, how incredibly brave and generous and sharing and also how horrible and nasty and evil people can be, you know, at the same time in conflict zones. And so it brings out the worst and the best in people. And you’re right about grievances and concerns about that because, of course, in the post conflict period, I mean, I don’t like using post conflict because very few places are really post conflict. But certainly if there isn’t, if it isn’t seen by people that justice is going to be served, then people will take matters into their own hand and you get revenge killings and all sorts of really horrible things in the post, let’s just say the post military kinetic phase, as they say. And I’ve seen a lot of that, whether that’s in Kosovo or in Iraq. We all saw that in Iraq, Afghanistan, people sometimes try to take matters into their own hands if they don’t think the state or the government or the governing power is going to do that for them.

Minter Dial: And then what about building resilience? I mean, what are the, I mean, I feel if you took every more or less safe, peaceful, privileged kid in these countries like the UK and the United States, and you took them and you showed them some other more difficult situations. I mean, you know, let’s say, obviously in a safe manner and all that, but they need to understand that life is not as difficult as we think it is in this materialistically safe world.

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, I mean, so I just spent some time in Ukraine. I was there in early August. And you can look at Ukraine and Israel as countries that are, let’s just say, more developed than some of the other places where there’s probably more fights over scarce resources. You go to Ukraine or I capital, Kyiv, and you feel like this is a modern European city. And yet they’ve been tested now. They’ve proven remarkably resilient, as we’ve seen how brave they are, how innovative they are in Israel. I think more and more people feel that the way of life that they knew has changed. And some people say they may be ready for more sacrifices. They do go to war with Lebanon. I don’t know if that’s true or not. And, of course, Palestinians have been living pretty much in a cage for a very long time, and so they have a very different experience of that conflict as well. I don’t know how you build resilience. I think it’s important in a lot of ways. Some countries do it by practicing for, let’s just say, natural disasters or, you know, enrolling in youth corps, getting kids to spend a year or two in national service. There are all sorts of ways you can do things. And I think the more, you know, people adjust very quickly, which we saw during COVID didn’t we? I mean, pretty quickly, the new normal was established. I think most of us spent about a week thinking, we may die tomorrow. And then we were like, eh, I’ll die, but maybe not of COVID And so, you know, we just got on with things, right? And we adjusted very quickly. We all went online. We, you know, got some exercise we shared with each other. So people can be very resilient, right? I mean, not always, though, as you say. And I think the fewer threats, existential threats that people face, maybe their resilience muscles atrophy a bit, and maybe that’s part of the challenge.

Minter Dial: Certainly something I feel we’re going to get into the Rusi a little bit more in the detail. But another question that you just mentioned that I feel, I was wondering, Karin, whether in the work that you did at the Rusi, was there ever discussion about bringing back, reinstalling national service?

Karin von Hippel: Some people do talk about that, yeah, in different places. I mean, not just at the think tank. I’m still there. I’ll be there probably till the end of the calendar year. But I have submitted my resignation in June. But, yeah, I mean, I think those conversations happen everywhere. And, you know, you see it in the United States. People talk about, you know, you can do national service in many ways. You can become a teacher in an underprivileged area. You can volunteer at work, let’s just say in a hospital. I mean, there are all sorts of ways you can serve the community. I think the important thing for me about national services, it blends everybody together. So it’s not just the rich kids hanging out the rich kids, or the poor kids hanging out the poor kids. Everybody mixes and they find they have a lot more in common than they think they did. And countries that do that kind of service, you know, whether it’s Korea or Israel or elsewhere, you know, that’s one thing people always point out is it was a great leveler that people treated everybody else pretty much the same when they had to exercise together and do all sorts of things together. So it’s a great way for people to get to know each other, get to know their country, establish longstanding friendships from across many different divides, too, as well as think about security, the community, the public good.

Minter Dial: Really, I think, well, the other word for me is service, being of service to your country. And I also wonder to what extent conversations happen around the concepts of nationhood. There’s sort of a lot of political weight around this idea of sovereignty of the nation, of patriotism, nationalism. All of a sudden, it goes off the deep end. To what extent should we be allowed to be proud of a nation? Because it’s almost at the exclusion of others. When one is proud of us, there’s this feeling that you’re not us. So are we allowed to be proud of our nation? What is a nation today, given the poorest nature of our boundaries?

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point, because I think about that a lot. When I served in the us government, I was there for about six years. A lot of people would say, you know, he loves her country, he loves his country, she’s patriotic. And I can love my country, but love other countries and feel a connection to people in many countries. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. So I can be an American, I can be German, but I don’t need to be better or worse than anybody else. Do think that sometimes people, it gets quite. It’s perceived in a zero-sum way, which isn’t right, because we should care. We should care about people in different places that are struggling not because it’s in our national interest, but because it’s the right thing to do. Right. So whether we care about women in Afghanistan now that the Taliban have basically, you know, excluded them from pretty much everything, that doesn’t have to be in the national interests of the United Kingdom. It just has to be in. It’s in the interests of women, the interests of women in Afghanistan. So I do think it’s a good point to make because I do think people often, you know, maybe they spend too much time in their own country. They don’t spend as much time abroad. They don’t see things from different perspectives.

Minter Dial: Well, that’s certainly an advantage you and I have of having lived in different countries. But I would argue that you have certainly traveled the world a whole lot more and seen it in a light that I certainly haven’t. And to what extent, obviously, these types of thoughts about, well, my country is important, my country is sovereign. Let’s take the Ukraine as an example. Is it right to feel pride about my country? And if so, then shouldn’t everybody have a right to feel pride in their country? And the issue is that, that pride comes quickly with ego and then power. And the problem is resources are limited. So to the extent that we want to do something for others, it’s an endless pit as far as trying to solve the world’s problems. So there needs to be some kind of a priority on home. Let’s fix home, because if you don’t fix home, how can you be good elsewhere? And then when you go elsewhere, what do you prioritize?

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, I mean, I think you probably can do both, though. So Ukraine is an independent, sovereign country. It’s been independent since 1991, and it was invaded by a neighboring country and that neighboring country, let’s just not blame the Russians. Let’s blame Putin, really, because he’s a dictator and he’s doing this, but he is really trying to eliminate the Ukrainian people, the language or culture. It’s horrible, the things that they do to civilians and soldiers and that kind, it really is just horrible, this war. And it’s. And so one argument that, of course, many western countries make for supporting Ukraine is, well, they’re fighting for us in a way. They may be fighting for the rest of us, because if Russia wins, you know, where is Russia going to go next? Is it Moldova? Maybe the Baltics? Who knows? There’s lots of conjecture about that. So certainly we don’t want might equals right to win it goes against the UN charter. It goes against our values or our communal values, but it’s also not, you know, but also we want to help the Ukrainian people, by the way, just like we want to help the Sudanese people or we want to help the Afghan people. And so there are always charges of hypocrisy. Right. Well, you’re not doing something in this country that you’re doing in this country. And is that because they’re white? You know, some of those. Those charges are valid. There are often a lot of other reasons why we are not able to do more in certain places than we’re doing somewhere like Ukraine and the money we’re spending in Ukraine. So it gets quite complicated when you delve into it. But, yes, there’s certainly mixed motives for the countries that we help in a significant way and the countries we help in a maybe more superficial way.

Minter Dial: Yeah, the narratives. Right.

Karin von Hippel: I. Yeah, I mean, the narratives are important, but there’s also. Sometimes these things are legacies, right. We’ve been giving Egypt money. The United States has been giving Egypt money for decades, or Israel for decades. I mean, there’s some legacies that they get embedded in the US Congress or, you know, every year these things get repeated. And sometimes it’s also not so simple. Just to change course. Doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t think about those things. But there are all sorts of reasons that the United States, United Kingdom and others help or partner with or ally with other places.

Minter Dial: So, Karin, you were ten years, or had been, because you still are at.

Karin von Hippel: The head of the almost. Yeah, almost nine years. It’ll be nine years.

Minter Dial: Yeah, exactly. And under your stint, you grew the Rusi. You doubled, more than doubled the size in terms of employees, and you grew the revenues from six to around 16 million pounds. As I researched. Congratulations on that. Just for us to understand, let’s talk about what is the dominion, what is the purpose of the Rusi and maybe how did it grow into this?

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, so we say we’re the world’s oldest defense and security think tank, founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington just after Waterloo, a little ways after Waterloo. But I think the Duke of Wellington at the time felt that he. That, you know, in a sense, you know, yes, the Brits won, beat the French, but in some ways it was quite close. It was not necessarily as strategic as it should have been. And I think the duke felt that military officers needed a place to debate and discuss that Washington, that took the hierarchy where the hierarchy wouldn’t matter as much. And so he basically established Rusi to have an independent forum where debate and discussion could take place in a more open way. And I think we still try to. We still adhere to those same principles. So it’s a convening forum for diverse views. It’s no longer just military people who come to Rusi and we no longer just focus on military strategy. We focus on all sorts of things, but it’s. The area is defense, security and geopolitics. It’s also an independent think tank, so it’s not aligned with the political party. There’s no rooster view on anything. Other think tanks like the Henry Jackson society is more pro democracy capitalism. There’s some, like IPPR, that’s more labor friendly. There are others like the Centre for Policy Studies is more Tory friendly, Tory-focused, RUSI, Chatham House, II, SS or a few of the other ones are more, are just independent, they’re not politically aligned. So. And we’re, of course, data driven, we’re policy focused. So we don’t just do studies on sort of esoteric academic things, we leave that to the universities. We’re advancing knowledge. I’m not making fun of it. It’s really important to do esoteric academic types of studies, but it’s the type of work we do is, you know, trying to help policymakers think through options for big challenges. Because, as I know from my own experience, when you’re in these jobs, you don’t have a lot of time to be thinking longer term and how to deal with some big challenges. And then we can pull together all sorts of people from private sector, from public sector, former officials, current officials, and have some really interesting conversations, sometimes off the record, sometimes on the record.

Minter Dial: I would have to imagine in the UK situation, a lot of your work or relationships are with civil servants as opposed to the elected politicians. But how do you liaise? I mean, you know, now that you have Starmer versus Sunak, what did you have to. Were you involved at some over in the changeover? Where does the relay baton get passed along to you?

Karin von Hippel: Well, we work with all types of politicians, civil servants, politicians, ministries, a lot of different ministries. We work from the top level to the lower levels. Different colleagues at Rusi have different relationships with people in government. What I find compared to, I’ve worked in American think tanks too, is there is more interaction. The UK is smaller, of course, in the United States, so there’s more interaction with quite senior levels. I mean, at some of our events we will have MP’s or people from the House of Lords who just show up to participate, who aren’t speakers. You wouldn’t really find that very often in the United States, a senator showing up and sitting in the audience and asking a question. No, you probably have a Senate staffer in the audience, but very unlikely, if they aren’t speaking that they would show up. But we do get that quite frequently. Our location is amazing. We’re on Whitehall, so we’re right in the, you know, the corridor is a.

Minter Dial: Power, as you could say, and nicely renovated.

Karin von Hippel: Yes, and recently renovated. Our building built for us in 1896, who just spent about 13 million pounds renovating it because it really needed an upgrade. So we’re quite lucky in that way. Even if more people are doing things online, you know, there is something to be said about physically being with people, to have these discussions, whether they are just being in the room when someone gives a talk. I find personally, I like it much better. I would have preferred to be sitting across from you than on a screen like this. But, hey, we have to do what we have to do sometimes, but certainly for our events. So we have events at Rusi that are public and private for members or expert type groups. We publish papers, we publish short papers, and we have a whole range of podcasts and other types of output. So just trying to really impact the debate. Many of us spend a lot of time commenting on the media, commenting on events, and really trying to help explain some of the things that are going on. I’m not sure we’re always successful, but we do our best. So that’s kind of the life of a think tanker.

Minter Dial: Yeah. And I obviously have seen you in the press, television, quite a lot in terms of defense and security. In geopolitics. I was trying to put my head around this because I’m just a regular punter comes to this, things like defense and security. What on earth? How do you distinguish, or are they all related? Cyber, terrorism, military, food, energy, health, pandemic, climate, space, finance. I mean, finance. Do you have like a. Do you have to think about each of these individually? Are they all interrelated? How on earth do you organize that? Karin?

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, it’s a great question because these are intermingling, as you say. I think if you would have taken a senior general 20 years ago, they would have said, well, we focus just on the kinetic, on the military activity today. They have to think about cyberattacks. They have to think about the use of AI. They think about democracies being challenged or misinformation. They think about a range of what they call gray area because some countries, like Russia, fight in different ways now. And so we all think about the full range, the full spectrum of threats, some of which seem to be fully civilian, but they’re not that, you know, cyber attacks or whatever we’re talking about, or attacks on critical infrastructure. There’s a whole range of things that I think civilians and the military alike need to be thinking through and working together. I think the Brits have always been very good on sort of joined up ness, you know, join up government, bringing the right people in the room to deal with challenges. So whether it’s terrorism and having police, mi five, you know, thinking about threats domestically, but working very closely with maybe mi six, CIA and others overseas, because so many threats are now transnational, and we need to be using as many of our tools as possible in the tool chest. I think the advanced technologies that we’re dealing with now, whether that’s AR or quantum or others, are only going to make this far more complex and difficult to deal with going forward. So I think the job of anybody in the security field is just going to get much more complicated.

Minter Dial: Yeah. You think about how private enterprises now doing space, that civilian commercial element, helping to be a little bit more agile in the way we do things and doing spacesuits that are actually affordable as opposed to ridiculous. And then when it comes to military, you’ve seen how in Ukraine, so many of the just regular citizens have stumped up and done things with it, whether it’s drones or whatever else they’re doing. I often talk about communication, how that’s important in organizations. And of course, it’s deeply important in the military to have a good channel of communication in today’s world, with all these complexities and different forms of defense and attacks and issues, it must be so important to share what’s going on with one another between the US and the UK, the French, and all of Europe in general. But there’s so many actors and there’s so many different things to keep on top of. How does one stay on top of all these elements? It seems like it’s just total chaos.

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, it’s difficult. You know, of course, within governments, there’s a lot of sharing. There’s something called the five Eyes, which are the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, where they share intelligence. They share it more pretty much openly between the five, but then often they’ll bring in others, whether it’s France or Israel or some of this will be done bilaterally, depending on what happens. And the sharing is incredibly important. I think that, you know, post Brexit, the Brits lost access to a lot of European databases, Europol and others. And so they’re losing, you know, it doesn’t mean that they’re not getting information about threats, but not as quickly as they would have had they stayed, you know, in the EU to share the security threats with their partners in Europe. So certainly governments, individuals and governments are sharing all the time. And, you know, you have people, not just embassies meeting with their counterparts wherever they’re posted, but, you know, constant people are embedded. People are talking on the phone, they’re traveling. There’s. So the relationships are quite tight with allies in particular at NATO, wherever it might be. And then, you know, the rest of us who are not in government trying to get access, we just have to use whatever tools we can to learn. And that’s why, in a sense, think tanks can provide a role because they can help educate the public about what’s going on. They can host government officials who can explain from their perspective what’s happening. You can challenge a government official. I think it’s important for government officials to be challenged, not just by the press, but bye, you know, by the public, whether it’s at a think tank or elsewhere, and just, you know, trying to learn from each other. And these days, because of the, let’s just say the democratization of technology and communications technology, many of us, you know, with, with this whole thing, this is basically an intelligence tool, right? I can take a photograph and send it to somebody. It’s open source. I can send it up. I can upload to various sites. So whether it’s Bellingcat, which is an amazing investigative journalism organization, or in Ukraine, civilians, or when they see something overhead, they immediately know where to send the information to. So, so many more people participate in understanding what’s going on. Of course, that means there are also fakes and deep fakes. And so we have to get smart about identifying what’s real and what isn’t. But so many of us now can play a role that was traditionally the reserve of an intelligence officer, a spy or a diplomat, because we can also, you know, be visiting this country. We can see something that’s going on. We can record it. We can take photographs. We can share it with people. We can write about it. And so it has fundamentally, in many ways, change the jobs of spies, of diplomats and others. And there are many more people who can participate today than probably could have 2030 years ago.

Minter Dial: Yeah, there are definitely different models of, like, Pro Publica looking at how, what’s going on. And of course, for those who weren’t looking at the video, you were just bringing up your mobile phone. But you mentioned the press. And I was just going to reflect that the Rusi seems to have partly a role of in the weeds with governments and down and dirty with, you know, learning with what’s going on them, influencing them. And the other is, is communicating and democratizing the information towards the public. So you have sort of head, head in the, in the, in the weeds and then spreading the word out to the rest. Is that a fair.

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, I mean, we, we are a charity in the UK. We are a charity. And that means we, our work is really intended for the public good. And so how you define that and how you get the message out so it’s not just held tightly is important. But the other interesting thing, if I could just go back to some of the open source, called open source intelligence. So it’s the kind of work that Bellingcat does or that we have done at Rusi where we can get access to certain types of technologies. So, for example, we have done very interesting work on north Korean ships that are violating sanctions just using, you know, satellite imagery and other materials that you can find in the open source then when. So if we do something like that, we publish a report on how North Korea is violating sanctions, sending weapons to Russia, for example, to be used in Ukraine. It’s a lot easier for governments to share that because they’re sometimes worried about sharing intelligence too widely. So they have their normal buddies they share it with, but sharing it widely, it’s more complicated. So it’s easier for them to share a study from Rusi, even if they fund it because it’s open source. And so that’s another way that governments actually use organizations like Rusi or Bellingcat or others use in a way, not necessarily a negative way, but they use the information that we have to help them do their work because it’s often easier to say, hey, look what these guys just did. We find this interesting. What do you think?

Minter Dial: In some ways it’s because it’s less discreet, it’s more public, it’s available to.

Karin von Hippel: The public, and they’re not violating, they’re not sharing. I mean, governments and intelligence agencies are notorious about opening up and sharing information. So what the United States did just before the war in Ukraine started in February 22, if you recall, they released information about Russia and Russian intentions. That was probably the first time I can think of that they purposely did that beforehand. It was a very smart thing to do, but it’s hard for them to do things like that. So it’s easier in some ways to say, well, look at this study. Isn’t this interesting, assuming that the study is reliable and not made up?

Minter Dial: Yeah, because if they release an information that was from some sort of secret source, they could be putting at risk that source.

Karin von Hippel: Exactly.

Minter Dial: So going back to the issue of press, and I’m just wondering, Karin, how you reflect on that, because not only has Internet changed the course of business models of press in general, but it seems to me that we have, and they use the term of the extremization of press or the not Bernie Madoff, but the Australian guy.

Karin von Hippel: Oh, yeah. Rupert Murdoch.

Minter Dial: Murdoch. The Murdoch-isation of the press in order to sell and there’s no more budget for investigation. Do you feel like the Russia has had to change its approach in light of the way the press has sort of had to shift its way of doing business?

Karin von Hippel: I don’t know. I mean, I think there are so many amazing journalists out there, so I’m not as worried about that. It’s more competitive, it’s more complex. There’s less money for the girl, referring to less money for the more traditional reporting, but somehow others tend to fill in that void. Yes, there’s lots of noise and there’s lots of politicized news, but there’s still some very good news out there. You just have to dig maybe a bit more. And I think, you know, many people say, oh, the BBC is biased or the New York Times is biased, CNN’s biased, Fox News is biased. So, you know, and because we have so many more options, I think that’s part of the challenge is that many of us read very different sources. And, you know, in the United States in particular, you can live in totally different spheres, never even listen. Like, if you walk Watch Fox News, you’re never going to be watching CNN or any of the other ones. And so your information is different, too. And so your realities are different. And that’s what I find more scary than anything else. And so people do have to do a lot more work to try to figure out what’s going on. A lot of younger generation, you know this from your children, they get information not from the news sources, but they get it from all sorts of social media sites, some of which are, you know, are owned by the Chinese, some of these that, too, some of which, you know, they do have good information, but they also have a lot of misinformation. And so, you know, now a lot of schools are trying to educate kids on how to challenge information, understand what’s real and what isn’t real. But I’m not so sure adults all understand that either. So.

Minter Dial: No kidding. Well, not to mention the fact that we, you know, we all still have our biases and our own issues. Talking just lastly about the Rusi itself and your experience there, you’ve obviously seen a lot, and you’re now at the dusk of this particular term. But can you give us a big bright spot that you have looking forward with your view on geopolitics? And then, of course, I’m going to ask you about a less bright spot.

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I think personally, I’m quite concerned about what might happen after the us elections and how that goes. And I think America certainly could go in many different directions depending on who wins, and that will have an impact on America’s allies. So. And personally, I think, you know, Donald Trump will be a destructive force if he wins. And I think Kamala Harris, even though we don’t know that much about her, I think she’s likely to continue a number of policies of President Biden. And, you know, whatever you think about President Biden, he’s certainly the most experienced foreign policy president United States has had in a long time. I mean, I care more about foreign policy in many ways than other things, even though I know that domestic policy is important, but I focus more on foreign policy. And so I am worried that if Donald Trump wins, all sorts of, there’ll be all sorts of ramifications and there’ll be negative, all sorts of negative impacts from it, just like the last time around. He certainly let some negative forces out of the bag that are hard to put back in. And so at the global level, let’s not forget that it’s the world’s becoming more multilateral. United States may not be a weakening power some people think it is, but let’s just say it isn’t necessarily weakening. But other countries, including China, are expanding their strength. And then, of course, there are all sorts of ways of being strong without having nuclear weapons, physical might. There are all sorts of ways that smaller countries and non-state actors even can assert themselves, can cause trouble, you know, in way without necessarily having a lot of money, having a lot of weapons. So there’s all sorts of ways that threat vectors can hit us. And, you know, as we get more into drone warfare and robotics, you know, it’s only a matter of time till some of those armed, armed weapon systems may be used in our own countries. And I think that is something to be worried about. And we don’t have enough international coordinating mechanisms to manage some of those threats. So those are some of the. And there’s a lot of things to be worried about, that’s for sure. Nuclear weapons and hypersonics and all sorts of weapon systems and the bad guys like Putin not respecting the UN charter baiting other countries, all sorts of things to be worried about, I suppose. On the bright side, I think the United States is probably a bit better now at listening and partnering than it may have been in the past, because I think some of these challenges are too big for any one country to solve on their own. And all of us have to figure out how to work with China, because you could say Russia and Iran and North Korea, we can put them in that little weird, like, okay, let’s not touch them. We can isolate them, but China, you can’t do that. And China is too important. It’s too intertwined with all of our economies, and we won’t be able to fully extricate ourselves even if we wanted to, and we shouldn’t really. It’s too important of a country, but it’s a complicated country and it’s not so simple. And so I think we need to figure out a, in a more profound way, how to work with China even when we don’t agree. We need to figure out how to manage that relationship. And then you have other countries like India, which now India is the most populous country in the world, over 1.2 or 3 billion people playing a really interesting role at the global level. Also saying we don’t need to align with one side or the other or any side. We can choose our friends and we can partner with whoever we want, and why not? Of course they should do that. And they will say, we’re not anti-western, we’re just non-western. Right. And so it’s just the chessboard’s getting more complicated and the relationships between all of these countries. Don’t forget, India and Russia have a good relationship, but India and China do not. But China and Russia have a stronger relationship. Right. So it gets quite complicated if you, you know, you have your flow chart or you’re following, you know, who likes who and who doesn’t like who and who’s working with who.

Minter Dial: The enemy of my enemy is my.

Karin von Hippel: Friend or not sometimes is my enemy. Exactly. So. And how all of us navigate these complex arrangements is, you know, it’s a work in progress. Right. We’re still figuring it out.

Minter Dial: As a matter of interest, do the Chinese have any form of independent think tanks?

Karin von Hippel: Well, they have think tanks, but they’re, you know, government funded.

Minter Dial: So enough said.

Karin von Hippel: I think. Yeah, well, I think that there are certainly independent thinkers in China. They just have to do it in a certain way and they have to be quite careful. And, you know, if you pull, you know, if you’re at a meeting with some, you know, your Chinese colleagues, you can have very interesting conversations, but it’s not so simple and they have to be very careful. So, yeah, it’s certainly not open and free like I think many of us would wish it to be. But, you know, it’s a, it’s an alternative governance model that many other countries, many of their leaders want to emulate.

Minter Dial: And going back to a point you made earlier, probably much better to have in person conversations, preferably not tapped. I want to end last part of our chat here, Karin, about leadership. You’ve been the director general of the Rusi, and obviously I like to look at leadership, and I would argue that there’s a lack of great leadership models out there and that we need some more good models and especially female models in leadership. I think it’s particularly useful. So in your experience, Karin, first of all, how would you describe your style of leadership?

Karin von Hippel: So I think, you know, I’m not sure I’m a great leader or a poor leader or probably just an average leader.

Minter Dial: Well, let me just step in 1 second, Karin, the number of people who have made comments about your leadership from all the various Chairmans of the various committees, people of very high standing have saluted your leadership.

Karin von Hippel: That’s very nice. But if you ask some of my staff, they may not agree with that. But anyway, look, I mean, I try to, you know, I think also when people describe their leadership, they’re not always very good at understanding really how they do lead. I think we all assume that we’re better than we are and we give ourselves credit for things. I do try to delegate a lot. I don’t like to micromanage unless I really feel like I have to. And you know, at Rusi, it’s great because so many of my director, our directors are really incredibly bright and they know their subject area far better than I do. So I don’t want to even try to start telling them how to do their day job. And I see my, in many ways I see my job as I work for everybody who works for me, really. I actually work for them. I’m not sure they all realize that, but I do work for them and I try to make their lives a lot easier. So I try to help with fundraising, with networking, with opening doors when I can. And that’s really how I see my role, I guess, because we don’t make money in the traditional way, we have to raise funds for all of our work. We raise our funds every year for all the work that we do. So it’s quite tough. You have to be entrepreneurial and innovative to survive in a think tank. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s what I see my job as, is to try to promote everybody, to try to help the younger people have more opportunities to learn how to communicate, whether that’s writing and speaking, getting their arguments across. So really helping young people have really great opportunities. You don’t make a lot of money, but hopefully you have a great opportunity as a young person because you probably are going to be exposed much more to senior thought leaders than you might in a more traditional, hierarchical organization. So we try to be flat. It doesn’t always work that way, but that’s certainly what we try to do. And I try to. I try to be. I try to delegate because I trust people, and I think they know what they’re supposed to do better than I do. And we’re all kind of adults, you know, it’s at this stage in our lives, you have to sort of trust your people. You know, when they work at home, I don’t worry about how long they’re on the screen. I know some organizations do all of that. I don’t do that. I just assume that they’re doing their job. Now, if there’s a problem, we have to deal with that, and nothing is ever perfect. But I think that’s part of the reason we have done pretty well these last few years, is I let people get on with it and I help when I can and I interfere when I have to, but try to get out of the way.

Minter Dial: Yeah, it does seem like if you treat people like adults as opposed to like kids, then they do tend to get along with it. But as soon as you start micromanaging or treating them in a less honorable, respectful way, well, inevitably there are negative things that come out of that. So you have interfaced with so many interesting people. I mean, the scurrilous desire would be to know who’s the most interesting or the most weird or the most this and that, but we’re not going to get into that. What I do want to talk to you about is you see these different types of leaders, and just to take a little parallel, I’ve interviewed a member of the Lions rugby team leadership of the Lions versus leadership of England versus leadership of bathe, and how different that is. And that struck me as particularly interesting because you had the national, you had the transnational pride of history, and then your commercial leadership under both. In your case, you’ve seen politicians, military generals, including my good friend Mark. You’ve seen royalty, business leaders, NGO’s. I mean, so many different types of leaders. So, first question is, if you can, do you think that there are some characteristics that are in common to all the best of these?

Karin von Hippel: That’s a great question, Minter. And it has been a privilege having access to all sorts of leaders from so many different countries, so many different fields. That’s part of the job I think I enjoy the most, is learning from people, listening to people, and being really impressed by what everybody does. Sorry, what was the question? How.

Minter Dial: What characteristics? Did you see any common characteristics amongst the best of them?

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, I don’t. You know, I. It kind of depends, because some people come from very hierarchical organizations, like the military, and when they excel in that kind of environment, it’s quite interesting to see what. What traits that those leaders have. And often they’re very strategic thinkers or big thinkers, and they can deal with all sorts of things happening at the same time. They’re also very good managers, I find, with the military, you know, because you move up and you’re managing people most of your career, but then line of command. Yeah, but, yeah, but it’s not so simple, right? Thriving in that. But when I meet people who, you know, have created amazing nonprofits, civil society organizations that are in quite lateral and flat, they have to be quite creative and quite entrepreneurial to succeed, and that’s not so simple. And I’m always impressed by those kinds of skills, but a lot of it is communicating. It’s taking initiative, it’s being persuasive without maybe being a pain in the butt. And, you know, I sometimes find that the quieter people who don’t jump in and aren’t the first to speak often can be the most persuasive. But really, it’s so different depending on the type of field and the type of work that they do in the countries, because, of course, every country has different approaches to a lot of this. So I don’t know if I could say that there are any traits in particular that I think are better or worse than others. It’s just interesting to kind of aggregate. You probably have a very good idea, because I know you think about this all the time. You write about this all the time. I’ll do a podcast with you and you can tell me the answers to this.

Minter Dial: Well, I wouldn’t vain, but there are obviously differences in the constructions of the structures they’re working in the different cultures. I wonder to what extent charisma is something that you notice in certain people and is that more relevant in one domain than another, like politics or business?

Karin von Hippel: Yeah, it’s interesting because, you know, recently in politics, people say you need to have charisma to succeed. And then often the people who have charisma aren’t very good leaders. Right. And so if you think about, you know, some of the previous prime ministers of this country or the United States, some of them, sometimes it’s kind of the quiet, nerdy ones who were better bosses, better leaders, but they’re not charismatic. And we expect now our leaders to be charismatic, which I think that we shouldn’t be in politics, because what you really want are people who can get things done. If they happen to be charismatic, that’s great. But sometimes people who are charismatic just enjoy giving speeches but aren’t as good at getting to the weeds and making things happen. So. And then there’s some people who are a little bit too charismatic that you don’t really trust them too. Right. They seem a little bit too much like a used car salesman. And so you want to be a little bit careful. So I remember when I worked in Kosovo, we, in 2000, it was after the bombing campaign when the Serbs left. And the Albanians, you know, for all sorts of reasons, they didn’t, the international community didn’t want the Kosovar Albanians to be running the government because they hadn’t been recognized. And there were all sorts of sovereignty issues. And so with the international community, the UN became the interim government. So many of us were in charge of Kosovar departments, which was ridiculous, and I wouldn’t recommend it again, but it was at the time thought a good idea. And I remember we had, so we had, like, in the UN, we had sort of the head, like, let’s just say the prime minister and the president, you know, and then we had the military people in charge, and then we had governors and the governor, who I was always the most impressed by was a Swedish guy who didn’t want to get involved in politics. You know, everybody said, oh, we got to negotiate between the, you know, Serbs and the Albanians. He just wanted to get stuff done. He wanted to get the roads back up and running. He wanted to get the sewage cleaned up. He wanted to get the streets cleaned. And, you know, he was the most effective leader. And I, he got stuff done right. And so it’s sort of, in a way, my perception. I don’t know very well much about him, but Governor Tim walls from Minnesota, who’s a vice-presidential candidate for Kamala Harris, he just seems to be somebody who likes to get things done. And he’s also quite charismatic, too. But, you know, that’s always my personal preference of who I want to vote for. I want someone who can take care of things, not just talk about things, but maybe doesn’t get it done. But we seem to now have this expectation we want someone to be charismatic as well as. And there aren’t that many people who can do both. I haven’t seen many. Maybe you have. I haven’t seen too many leaders who can.

Minter Dial: No, I mean, I’m thinking I had this vision in my mind of the film ridicule, the French film which talks about the Le Roy Soleil and his court and all the courtiers and the ridicule that was happening here. And this one guy comes up and he’s a doer, he has a real idea and he just gets squashed by the system. So it does mean that as a doer, you also need to know how to go through the system and be a little bit, sometimes sneaky in that way.

Karin von Hippel: Yeah. No, 100%. 100%. I agree with you. I saw that in the US State Department, because the US government, there’s so many people trying to do stuff, and you just cannot elbow. Bulldoze your way through. You have to make friends, you have to socialize ideas. That’s the term that they often use. Exactly. That’s exactly the same thing.

Minter Dial: I mean, in another political camp, they call it the swamp. Right? It’s, you know, this notion of the heaviness of systems, the lessees of systems. All right, well, Karin, if I had to say one word about leadership, just to finish on that thought, is the one characteristic that I systematically see is that they’re good communicators. That is the defining quality. And whether introvert or extrovertly, the ability to communicate one to one, one to many in the different situations according to making complex thoughts, simple, being concise, being clear. That, for me is the transcending quality. But that’s only been thinking about it with you as we speak.

Karin von Hippel: No, I think it’s a very good point. And I hear that from other people. You do something, you come up with your strategy and then communicate, communicate, communicate. It is the right approach. I probably don’t do it as much as I should. So I think it’s the right approach, but, yes, 100%.

Minter Dial: So, last question. If you care what’s in stall for the not the post conflict, but the post Rusi.

Karin von Hippel: Karin, I don’t know. I’m going to take some time just to chill out a bit and then try to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. So maybe you’ll have some advice for me. Mentor, I think you’ve had many different careers, too, haven’t you?

Minter Dial: Let us meet at the playground.

Karin von Hippel: Yes. Yes, we’ll meet around pint.

Minter Dial: Exactly. Many thanks for coming on. Any. Any ways that you’d like to send people who have been listening to this? What kind of destination would you like them to go to visit?

Karin von Hippel: You mean like websites?

Minter Dial: Yeah, it could be websites. Your links, your profile, whatever. Whatever you’d like.

Karin von Hippel: I don’t need to visit my profile. I. You know, I just think I be curious. Try to, you know, look at all sorts of different types of news sites. Don’t just rely on one source and try to really challenge yourself. If you see something that doesn’t sound right, dig into it more, because I think we all have to do that now, because otherwise we can, you know, be persuaded by misinformation and disinformation. So I just think we have to challenge ourselves and each other much more.

Minter Dial: It’s on us. Karin?

Karin von Hippel: Yes, mentor. Thank you. Thank you very much. Pleasure.