Jeffrey Gedmin for TAI: In many Western countries, voter ties to mainstream establishment parties are loosening, and those parties are in trouble. Is that happening in Finland and what does it look like? And second, you’ve been effective as a politician who is popular but not populist. How do you manage that?

Sauli Niinisto: To your first question, yes, it is very worrying. I try to remember whether we have seen anything similar and unfortunately we have: in 1930s Germany. At the time normal parties collapsed, and at the end they were pushed away with violence. But nevertheless, we haven’t seen these kinds of elements taking place earlier on.

In Finland I’m not specifically worried because what we’ve seen is that the traditional system with three big parties—Center, Social Democrats, Conservatives—is broken for the first time since the 1960s. But who broke it? The Greens. Well, they are a stable party. And then the True Finns, which is a different kind of party.

Nevertheless, we have had these kind of True Finns before with different names. In the late 1980s, they actually collapsed after having responsibilities in government. So we have a movement but I think it will be tamed. You see the same thing in other countries, we have seen in France, for example, Le Pen didn’t do as well as expected in EU elections. In the EU parliamentary elections, EPP lost. The Social Democrats lost, but not as much as the pollsters predicted.

So maybe we are even seeing that this phenomenon is now almost at a stopping point and might turn around. It might be that we have similar parties in the future with different names but that are actually very responsible and stable parties. But surely one should also look in the mirror. If you lose your support it has to be asked why—why Social Democrats have lost for a couple of years, why the conservatives in a country like in France have lost almost everything. It has to be studied very clearly.

TAI: What about you? You are an exceptionally experienced politician, and a Finnish friend of mine told me that you wrote a book that was a national bestseller and had a real feel for Finnish life and perspective. How do you navigate these things?

SN: It comes automatically. I don’t make any plans.

TAI: Instinct.

SN: In a way, yes. But when I was a young student, I worked a lot in factories and different kinds of places and I was quite silent, observing things, because you never knew what those workers thought about a student. But I had a common experience. I noticed that in every single place I had been working, there was one mental leader who might have been lazy one day, but who eventually said that now we can’t continue, we have to do some task. We can take it easy afterwards, but first we have to do this. It’s a responsibility.

Those people were not necessarily in a leading position. They were usually elderly people who felt that, “well, we have been a bit lazy, so now we have to do something.” Later on, when I was out of university, I worked quite a long time in a court of appeals and I noticed the same thing. There were always a group of judges, and I, being the young lawyer, was the one who presented in front of them. And sometimes it seemed that there were difficult cases that were being shoved aside and neglected because it was a court of appeals. It was all through a written process, so you could do that very easily. Then suddenly somebody out of the fold would say, “Boys, we have to remember that the time to act is now.”

So in a way it is similar in politics, and I’m afraid that I have sometimes taken it too seriously. Every time I have seen that behavior as a party leader, starting with my election in 1994, I always looked around and I wondered, “Well, well, what is this?” The result was that all the credit cards were taken away from the boys in the office. Kind of a wake-up call. Now we take care.

TAI: Turning to Russia, one has the impression that Finland is brutally realistic but also that you in particular have a good working relationship with Vladimir Putin. There is shared history and culture; someone told me that as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin would go to Turku. How do you balance a policy that is brutally realistic but also maintains a dialogue?

SN: First to Putin, I have told the story many times. I wasn’t in politics at the time, and not in Turku, but after becoming the President, Putin asked me about a mutual acquaintance in Turku, “How is he?” I was amazed and thought, “Why is he asking?” The explanation is that Putin never forgets that he was handled in a respectful way when he was not so high up. He doesn’t forget that kind of behavior. He still invites the then-Mayor of Turku to Moscow sometimes just because of that. That might also explain why he still keeps his old St. Petersburg friends around him now.

But how to handle this, I find it very simple. We make very clear what we think, for example on sanctions and defending Finland. In Russia there were worries about why American troops were in Finland, so I said clearly to him, “Yes, we want to develop our interoperability and our skills.” Why? I said, “Every independent country maximizes its protection.”

He has never come back to that issue because he accepted the answer. It was natural, surely, but you have to be straight with him. Or when I told him that we were deciding on sanctions, for instance. If you are clear with him there is no problem. He once recounted at length to me his memories of going back and forth with George Bush, as they were sitting at a table and having a hell of an argument. Bush said that if Putin did one thing, he would do another. And Putin answered that he would do something else in turn to retaliate. He was remembering a quarrel but it was a positive memory for him. That was amazing.

TAI: Because of the clarity?

SN: Because of the clarity and because he was taken seriously. Putin, in a way, sees it as a form of respect if you push back. It’s a funny thing but that’s my feeling.

TAI: Let’s think big picture about America. Part of “America First” nationalism comes from the Republican Party, but there’s a version on the Left too. If in the next few years America starts stepping back from Europe—because of China or domestic politics—is Europe yet ready to step forward and shoulder the burden of defense?

SN: We Europeans have made a mistake. We should have concentrated years ago. The United States says that they are important for Europe, and I surely admit that, but we need to tell them why we are important for the United States, and if we are not important, we should make ourselves important. That’s the best guarantee, in my opinion.

TAI: I’m one of those Americans who is fully convinced. But how do you and I convince ordinary Americans that small to medium sized European countries are still vital to American interests today?

SN: Well, first to Europe, I go back to what I said. Europe should be able to clearly tell Americans why Americans need Europe. Or if it is not enough, we have to make ourselves more important to the USA. But there are a lot of elements: trade, investments, and lots of jobs created by the huge European investment in the United States.

Then there are the values, which are more intangible. It’s difficult to explain why it is important, but maybe we note that the United States actually created the multilateral system on the front lines, and Europe is a strong supporter of that, and ask if we lose it, what happens next? It’s a wide world and that is not good for Americans. Even though you’re a bit remote, you are not untouched if the world is getting really wide.

TAI: Relatedly, how do you explain to Americans that the European Union is in our interest when there are some who think this is the moment of sovereignty? Brexiteers say it would be better if the EU dissolved into a loose association of nation-states rather than this supranational Brussels-centric model. How do you argue against that?

SN: I do not see that the EU hurts American interests. Brussels is not a superpower. The European Union is not a superpower. A very tight connection led by Brussels doesn’t hurt the USA. On the other hand, I admit that there’s a lot of things that we should do better in the European Union, and that’s why I would like to start the Finnish presidency of the Council of the European Union by asking, what do we have in common within Europe?

I’m sure that the answers would be the need for security, how to prevent migration like it was in 2015, since we can’t stand that amount, how we guarantee decent welfare for all Europeans. This is not being so ambitious. You should start from there, building up and discussing what we have in common. I’m sure that there are a lot of common answers but they are a bit different compared to what Brussels has been doing.

One element is security. For the first time in a couple of years, you are actually hearing EU people talk about security. You didn’t hear this in the 1990s nor at the beginning of this millennium. Nobody was really worried about that, and the attitude was somehow when people started to think that we Europeans are the best, we have the best values, we are good and we will spread the good all over the world. That really didn’t succeed.

TAI: Was this a naivety in the United States too? We talked about spending the peace dividend because the Cold War was over, and though we had the Gulf War and Kosovo, in the United States too there was an idea that the West was prevailing, that democracy was prevailing.

SN: And that our enemies were far behind us. Yeah. Maybe, maybe.

TAI: So what about China and Russia today, from your perspective? Russia seems to be quite shrewd in using different methods to make our democratic renewal more difficult, and then China is a challenge of a different character. Could you speak to how you see those two countries?

SN: We don’t see here in Finland, in elections or even otherwise, any Russian propaganda.

TAI: Or internal meddling in election processes?

SN: Not at all. Not a single example.

TAI: So why is that? Because in the United States, whether you are pro- or anti-Trump, we know that it happened.

SN: Maybe they didn’t have any interest. I haven’t heard anything from Sweden or Norway, either. They both had elections; not a word to that effect. It’s difficult to say but we haven’t seen it ourselves.

But nevertheless, yes, like you said, in the States, that took place. Well, there has always been propaganda spread but now when we have social media technology it becomes more and more dangerous. You reach a lot of people and people have difficulties. If you hear a piece of gossip, you may just dismiss it as gossip, but if you read it on social media, that gives a different impression. It’s seen as more reliable. That is dangerous, but here in Helsinki we have the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. We have to fight against this by means that they have developed in that sector.

TAI: So if those are techniques, what are Russians’ goals in Europe today?

SN: They say that they would like to cooperate more because they need Europe economically. But on the other hand, they seem to have close relations with certain movements in some countries too. In Italy we have heard voices that are doubting sanctions, for instance. But so far, unity has prevailed in the European Union, and I believe it will in the future too. Nevertheless, it is surely in the Russian interest to try to get rid of sanctions. But by these means, they won’t succeed in repairing the damages caused by the Ukrainian case.

TAI: And is China a different kind of challenge to the alliance and to Europe?

SN: They are investing heavily and we haven’t had any problem so far. But I think, and this is not only about China or Huawei, we have to be very careful with our important infrastructure—not to give it up easily. We have examples where for business reasons someone has been interested in infrastructure and it’s been partly sold, with not-so-good results. I would like to keep the central infrastructure in the hands of the state.

TAI: So in the case of Finland what kind of infrastructure?

SN: Water, waste water, electricity. There are a lot of examples of this kind of critical infrastructure, and 5G is one of those.

TAI: Are European colleagues similarly aware of the importance of ports and airports, too?

SN: Yes, I would guess that this is under discussion in many, many countries.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.