Former US intelligence chief Avril Haines: ‘Trump trusts his gut more than the expertise’

{"text":[[{"start":8.76,"text":"Just a few minutes into lunch with Avril Haines, and the conversation lands on the subject of the third world war. Rather than dismiss my interrogation about whether we’re in a pre-world-war period, the former US director of national intelligence says she’s been thinking about this very question."}],[{"start":25.32,"text":"Her new job is to head the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Washington think-tank that was created in 1910 on the premise that the era of major power conflict had ended, only to confront two world wars. So are we heading to a third? “I do think that is a plausible scenario — if we don’t figure out how to develop a structure that manages conflict.”"}],[{"start":48.2,"text":"Haines is steeped in the analysis of signals of breakdown. A lawyer by training, she’s had an almost 20-year career in national security, culminating in her appointment as Joe Biden’s main intelligence adviser in 2021, delivering his daily briefings. She’s never been an “operative”, a spy in the field, though she does look the part. Soft-spoken and understated, she lowers her gaze and stares at her hands when she speaks. She seems more comfortable in the shadows, shielded by her signature navy suits (even her ballerinas and earrings are shades of dark blue)."}],[{"start":82.6,"text":"Haines dissects the current geopolitical breakdown into its chilling components: the collapse of the rules-based international order, the rise in violence and state conflict, the weakness of institutions and the domestic political dysfunction that has turned democracy into a vehicle for the rise of strongmen. “Then you’ve got weapons of mass destruction,” she goes on. “It’s going to get harder to manage WMD, and that is something that I think is worth having on your list.”"}],[{"start":107.76,"text":"We are having this doom chat at the Terrace Café in the British Library in London, home to some of the world’s greatest historic manuscripts, including two of the four surviving original copies of the Magna Carta. War talk feels out of place in this sanctuary, where visitors often escape for peaceful study. Laptops are not allowed in the quiet, sprawling curve with floor-to-ceiling windows. Customers usually order food at the counter but we are treated as special guests and a waiter comes to our table. We both opt for roasted salmon and dill, with a peach salad served with courgettes and mixed leaves."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":144.48,"text":"Haines has a sentimental attachment to books, having run a bookstore café with her husband David, a pilot, in Baltimore in the 1990s. The bookstore was not part of her life plan: she had enrolled on a master’s degree in physics and had learnt to fly. The couple were fixing up a Cessna 310 and were determined to fly across the Atlantic. Then one day they came across a building that had been seized by the government in a drug bust."}],[{"start":170.8,"text":"“Everything was still as it was, it was like walking into a time capsule. The bar had drinks that were half-full, there were cobwebs.” Helen’s Hollywood Show Bar (Helen, the owner, was in jail by then) also had a brothel upstairs, catering to sailors. “We go upstairs and I’m walking through these rooms, and there are mattresses and it’s gross . . . ” Haines says."}],[{"start":190.44,"text":"The pair sold the plane, maxed out their credit cards and bought the building, and, in keeping with the spirit of the place, they held erotica readings on the upper floor. Haines’s father called her husband with a warning: “He was like, you’re going to have to support her for the rest of your life. This is what she’s good at — maths and science — that’s her thing.”"}],[{"start":210.2,"text":"The bookstore project was one among many unexpected twists in a remarkable back story. Haines, now 57, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the only child of a biochemist father and a painter mother who suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and developed avian tuberculosis. Her “extraordinarily brilliant” mother had a huge influence on her. “My life moved from crisis to crisis when I was younger. It was just very disruptive,” she says. Her mother’s chronic illness “made me so conscious of the privilege of living on some level, and a willingness to adapt to every crazy [situation]. You’re up in the middle of the night and she’d be having an attack. I had to do a tracheotomy on her and I had a doctor on the phone telling me what to do to cut her neck.”"}],[{"start":257.36,"text":"Haines left home soon after her mother’s passing to live with friends. Having secured all the credits she needed to graduate, she spent her last year of high school in Japan, studying judo."}],[{"start":275.08,"text":"“When [my mother] died, [and she was] everything that my life was focused on, suddenly I had all this space,” she confides. “I had watched too many Bruce Lee movies about being out on the ranch and doing martial arts. I loved the sense of possibility. And also, for a woman, learning that you can be in a fight and you’ll be fine, it’s important. It really gives you a sense of more control.”"}],[{"start":290.08,"text":"That experience, she says, was an important piece of the “puzzle”, which is the way she seems to think about her life."}],[{"start":296,"text":"The café food is pleasantly surprising. The roasted salmon is crispy and the bites of peach add a zesty juice to the salad. Haines is a slow eater, picking at her food, her mind intently focused on the journey from the bookstore to national security. As the bookstore thrived, Haines dabbled in community service and became the president of a business association."}],[{"start":316.84,"text":"“We were doing well . . . the question was: ‘Do I want to do this or do I want to work on the community stuff? What’s my next shot?’” She went away on her own for a weekend in the Bahamas, made lists of pros and cons and read books. She returned with her mind set on a new piece of the puzzle: she would go to law school and study international law because “it was the lawyers in the room who understood what levers to push in order to make change”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":343.92,"text":"Haines tells me about her career in government: how she got her first break by landing an internship at the state department’s legal adviser’s office; how she was captivated by Barack Obama’s famous 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention and decided she wanted to work for him (nearly a decade later, he made her the first female deputy CIA director); and how she connected with Biden in the late 2000s, when she was seconded to the Senate foreign relations committee, which he chaired."}],[{"start":373.54,"text":"I ask her about Biden’s condition in his last months in office, before he was forced to step aside as presidential candidate two years ago, too late to turn the Democrats’ fortunes around."}],[{"start":384.14,"text":"“What I can tell you is that foreign policy was always his love. Did he call a president by the wrong name? Sure. But I never had a question about whether or not he was present and capable of understanding what we were saying and reacting to it. Even in meetings in the last few weeks, he was there.”"}],[{"start":401.8,"text":"Much of the world is pining for the predictability of the Biden years, but some of his own foreign policy decisions have been questioned. Was his administration too timid in its early assistance to Ukraine and overly fearful of Russian nuclear threats? Why did it not use its leverage on Israel to prevent the wholesale destruction of Gaza after 2023’s October 7 attack by Hamas?"}],[{"start":425,"text":"Haines says Putin was bullying the US and its allies with his threats, but US intelligence assessed that there were people within his system pressuring him to act on those threats. There were also hesitant allies that the US had to take into account. “Among the options for how Russia could have used [nuclear weapons] at the time was actually exploding something in the atmosphere, or doing something quite small in the battlefield,” she says — something perhaps so minor that the US would not be able to react or attribute responsibility quickly."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":454.24,"text":"Her view has always been that the twin paths of bolstering Ukrainian military capacity and starving Russia of revenues will eventually shift Putin’s calculus and bring him to negotiations. The sanctions on Russia are starting to bite, she argues, and Putin will accept concessions when he knows that he cannot win militarily and that the economic cost is too high. I ask her about Europe’s growing anxiety over a potential Russian attack on the continent. Should I be worried? “It’s not impossible but it’s unlikely,” she says. With Donald Trump in power, Putin “doesn’t have the need . . . and it would actually galvanise the alliance against him.”"}],[{"start":490.64,"text":"When we turn to Gaza, Haines is more cagey, never quite criticising or justifying Biden’s reluctance to call Israel out. But she suggests that Israel was less likely to respond to Biden than to Trump. “One of the things you see in the Trump administration in the early days is that Trump seems to unlock a way to have leverage against people,” she says. “It shows that it’s possible to do it . . . but would it have been as easy for Biden to do that? If you’re as unpredictable as Trump . . . it builds some leverage for you on some level.”"}],[{"start":518.92,"text":"Trump’s relationship with Israel is complicated. While at times he has pushed it in the direction he wants, he has also allowed himself to be swayed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into going to war with Iran. Haines blames the “strategic mistake” of the war on the appeal of an Israeli narrative of likely regime collapse, as well as the absence of a policy process in decision-making for the war. “Part of it is [Trump’s] own way of making decisions. He trusts his gut, in many respects, far more than he trusts the expertise he’s being given,” she says. “But it was the wrong decision for a whole range of reasons that were clear to many people within the national security community, and it’s deeply depressing that that didn’t come to the president’s table in a way that allowed him to recognise the challenge.”"}],[{"start":566.24,"text":"What would Haines be advising if she were still heading intelligence? Pull together a big international coalition of states that have a mutual interest in a solution, she replies — though she acknowledges that it’s an unlikely prospect. “Otherwise, I don’t see how it just doesn’t continue to bubble up and bubble down.” The war, she says, makes the best case for the diplomacy that led to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, in which she was involved as deputy national security adviser and from which Trump withdrew the US during his first presidential term. “If I were teaching national security right now, I would use this to demonstrate the reason why you engage in a negotiation for the JCPOA [the Iran agreement].”"}],[{"start":608.12,"text":"Our plates are cleared and I insist that we indulge in a dessert, having had no wine or starters: carrot cake for me and apple pie for her."}],[{"start":616.84,"text":"We are, in many ways, living in the age of post-diplomacy, with multilateral institutions paralysed, alliances fracturing and populism growing. Haines believes Trump’s upending of traditional US foreign policy will not be reversed even if a new Democratic administration follows. What does the future look like? Her best-case scenario is that the world divides into regions that collaborate within but also without, which she describes as a “network approach”."}],[{"start":643.68,"text":"Though she makes a good argument that this collection of networks is the only plausible approach to achieving a semblance of stability, she acknowledges that it also risks devolving into spheres of influence where the most powerful state in a region bullies everyone else."}],[{"start":658.44,"text":"How the geopolitical dynamics evolve will depend largely on how the rivalry between the US and China is managed. Trump has stabilised the relationship with China in part because he is less hawkish than many in his administration, but he also sees the conflict more through an economic and business lens. “I think he also perceives a national security element, but he is not as focused on preventing China from having the capacity to control, for example, global supply chains, in a way that allows them to have what I would say would be unacceptable leverage over either us or other countries that are our allies.”"}],[{"start":693.32,"text":"The risk in the Trump approach is that it feeds China’s sense of American weakness and encourages Xi Jinping to seek concessions from Trump on Taiwan. “The concern is that during a Trump administration, [Xi] has a better chance of doing a deal [on Taiwan], and the deal that I can imagine, and that would be most concerning, is one in which he says, ‘All I need you to do is . . . distance yourself, in a sense, from Taiwan’.”"}],[{"start":719.72,"text":"As we wrap up lunch and walk out into the British Library courtyard, Haines tells me there’s nothing more beautiful than an old manuscript. There’s a piece of the puzzle that’s still missing: what does she read? Spy novels, of course, but a lot of science fiction too, her taste changing depending on the periods of her life. What is she reading now? Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, about the affair between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright that scandalised American society at the start of the 20th century. It’s an intriguing choice for a book, I think, as we say our goodbyes, but then so much of her life is surprising. It would, in fact, make a fascinating novel."}],[{"start":759.88,"text":"Roula Khalaf is the editor of the Financial Times"}],[{"start":763.32,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":779.88,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1790348990_4382.mp3"}