President Trump has directed Secretary of State Marc Rubio to negotiate a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine without Ukraine at the table. U.S. Army Lt. Col. (retired) Alexander Vindman was the director for European Affairs on the White House’s National Security Council, former Political-Military Affairs Officer for Russia and diplomat at the American Embassies in Moscow and Kyiv. He is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute and leads the Here Right Matters Foundation organization, which focuses on helping Ukraine win the war against Russia. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why he believes U.S. policy towards Russia has only emboldened Vladimir Putin and how tenants of liberal democracy might right the ship moving forward. His book is “The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:01] When Russian forces launched an unprovoked, full scale attack on Ukraine, it seemed inconceivable that the war would be grinding on three years later, or that hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed and wounded. The U.S. has assisted Ukraine’s self-defense with $66 billion in military aid since 2022. But it is worth asking how American foreign policy since the Cold War contributed to the conditions that made Ukraine vulnerable to invasion. From KERA in Dallas, this is think I’m Krys Boyd. Alexander Vindman is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and former director for European affairs on the White House’s National Security Council, a position that led to his testimony in President Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial for alleged abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Related to that call he made to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Vindman also served as a political military affairs officer and a diplomat at the American embassies in Moscow and Kyiv. Today, he is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute and leads the Here Right Matters Foundation, which focuses on helping Ukraine win the war against Russia. Those experiences have given him insight on why Vladimir Putin is so obsessed with controlling Ukraine, and led Vindman to the conclusion that the United States has moved in the direction of transactional foreign policy focused on crisis management, where what is needed is moral leadership and idealism. He explains all this in his new book, “The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine”. Colonel Vindman, welcome to Think.
Alexander Vindman [00:01:38] Lovely to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.
Krys Boyd [00:01:42] You make the case in this book that the U.S. and its allies have enabled the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine. And when you say this, you are not referring just to the Biden administration or to the Trump administration. How long is the history of Western missteps that helped set up what is happening now?
Alexander Vindman [00:01:58] I focus specifically on this period of post-Soviet Ukrainian independence from 1991 forward. I think we make mistakes all the time. We’ve made mistakes historically. What I wanted to understand is how we got to this war, this massive geopolitical earthquake, this major war between Russia and Ukraine that threatens to pull in Europe and really reformat the world back to where strong states prior on the week. And it. I understood that this relationship really started to matter, especially for Ukraine after 1991. And that’s across six different administrations, starting with George H.W. Bush. We’ve made the same mistakes over and over, what I referred to as the folly of realism.
Krys Boyd [00:02:42] We will get to the folly of realism and those mistakes of the past three decades in a moment, but I have to say, I think some Americans may not fully understand why, of all the former Soviet states now operating as independent countries, Ukraine is the one Vladimir Putin seems to be obsessed with reclaiming. Is it even possible for you, Colonel, to give us a short history of Ukraine versus Russia and Russian national identity?
Alexander Vindman [00:03:07] Yes. We’ll do a lightning round of a thousand years. But no, it’s really quite fascinating. The reason that Ukraine is so important to Russia is that they do have a thousand year history of interaction. If you go back that far, it was it was this place called Kievan Rus, Kyiv, its capital of of Ukraine that ruled and was the dominant power of the region. Hundreds of years later, the city was raised, and as empires do, they fall due to kind of struggles between different nobles. And then Russia had some breathing room. The predecessor of Russia had some breathing room to evolve from a small village in the woods just outside of Siberia into a regional power and grow. And then you fast forward another couple hundred years later, it’s Russia, Muscovy that becomes the regional power. And then they start to think about, you know, what’s their legacy? Which direction do they expand? They start expanding northeast. Southwest. And they run into the territory that is now Ukraine. This is a population that is in a super tough neighborhood. Ukraine has Russia to one side, the Ottoman Empire to the south, Polish-Lithuanian Empire to the northwest. And they look for allies and they say, wait, these guys, you know, we were connected to them at one point in the past, and they established a kind of an alliance. And Russia takes that as license to start to take control, dominate the region going forward. But the Ukrainians don’t give up on their their desires for independence. They they then fight for the subsequent hundreds of years for their own national identity, their own independence. In Russia, however, that breeds this, this notion that this is these are indivisible countries. Russia’s the great Russia, Ukraine they refer to as Little Russia. And Belarus is the third part of that formula without all three of those things together. Russia does not feel like it’s whole, and it’s been struggling to, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to bring these parts together.
Krys Boyd [00:05:03] Going into somewhat modern history, how did the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when the Soviet Union was still intact, shift the relationship Ukrainian people had to leadership seated within the Kremlin.
Alexander Vindman [00:05:15] It’s one of the major failures of the Soviet Union. This Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 that exposes the rot inside the Soviet Union. The reactor itself is not that far away from the capital of Ukraine, but it’s controlled by the Kremlin, by Moscow, many hundreds of kilometers away. And what ends up happening is, as this this accident unfolds, the Kremlin authorities, the Soviet Union downplays the dangers and allows the risks, the nuclear fallout, the radiation to kind of spill over and in effect, the regions of Ukraine. And it exposes this this rot in a way that creates a backlash both immediately to Soviet power, but also creates some some significant antibodies to dangers of nuclear power, and that ultimately including influencing Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons really within a decade.
Krys Boyd [00:06:13] We’ll talk about why and how Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. I do want to talk about this, though. How distinct are the cultures of Russia and Ukraine, and where would you say the two overlap?
Alexander Vindman [00:06:24] So we look at the language. For instance, you have the alphabets look quite similar, the grammatical structures are nearly identical, but the words themselves are quite different. You have something called cognates in Russian, like a word sounds similar to English. November nailbiter. In Ukrainian, it’s a completely different word tied to agrarian roots. It’s called at least a pod, literally falling leaf. So it’s hard for Russians to to understand Ukrainians, it’s easier for Ukrainians to understand Russians, because the fact is that under the Soviet Union, you learn both Russian and Ukrainian, and there’s more capability to understand Russian. They’re culturally they have they’re both Slavic and Eastern Orthodox, but still quite diverse. You have a lot of diverse influences in Ukraine. Greek Orthodox, Catholic Catholicism took root in western Ukraine. Russia is nearly consistently at least. The Christian component is consistently Eastern Orthodox, although there are Muslim populations in both countries and Jewish populations in both countries. Culturally also quite diverse, Russia considers itself to be the cosmopolitan center and Ukraine the periphery. There is a common understanding, but they are absolutely distinct countries, distinct languages, distinct histories. Ukraine, struggling to maintain its own identity even when it was under Soviet and Russian control, and Russia is struggling to subdue Ukraine for all those many decades and centuries.
Krys Boyd [00:07:53] And this, by the way, is why the outdated term the Ukraine is really offensive to Ukrainians, right? Because it sort of relegates the country to a territory of Russia or of the Soviet Union, as opposed to a sovereign state.
Alexander Vindman [00:08:05] Exactly right. So Krajina literally means the periphery. So it’s the periphery of Russia is when you say when you use the word the Ukraine as opposed to Ukraine. I think when Westerners say Ukrainians are good natured, forgiving people, but they prefer, of course, Ukraine as opposed to the Ukraine, which is what the Russians insist on using.
Krys Boyd [00:08:25] When the Soviet Union fell apart, there were these enormous questions and concerns about what would happen to the Soviet nuclear arsenal when the USSR was still intact. What role did Ukraine play in storing and maintaining Soviet weapons of mass destruction?
Alexander Vindman [00:08:41] It was an integral part of Soviet defense. 25% of the Soviet Union military industrial base was located in Ukraine. Ukraine produced some of the most important weaponry. Weapons systems, whether that’s major capital ships for the Navy rocket systems. They had a large civilian nuclear reactor, but with regards to the weapons themselves, the Russians maintained a tight control over those weapons. And the nuclear weapons fuel cycle was something that the Russians controlled. The launch codes were something that the Russians controlled. Nevertheless, as Ukraine was a vital part of the Soviet empire, 4000 nuclear weapons were located on Ukraine’s territory. So when the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukraine automatically inherited the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, a massive nuclear arsenal.
Krys Boyd [00:09:32] What reasons did Ukraine have for initially wanting to retain at least some of those weapons stockpiled on its own soil?
Alexander Vindman [00:09:39] The Ukrainians struggled with this notion that this is where Chernobyl becomes, you know, important and the legacy of a major nuclear accident. Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is kind of forefront of mind in the early 90s. That has to be balanced with the fact that Ukraine understands its neighbor to the north and east, that Russia, in its weakness, cannot prevent the spinoff of these nations pursuing their sovereignty. Soviet Union breaks up into 15 independent states, but that looming threat of a Russian revanchist and return to empire is looming. So for the Ukrainians, they seriously start to consider whether they could retain some or all of that nuclear arsenal. It’s not the easiest thing to resolve, of course. The focal points for the US and the West are to ensure that you don’t have the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the emergence of additional nuclear states, or that you have the risk of nuclear weapons. If you recall some of those movies from back then, lots of nuclear weapons floating around in the kind of a psyche of the world from the collapse of the Soviet Union. So the US is working to control nuclear weapons. The Ukrainians are thinking about retaining them, but also understanding their dangers and wanting to preserve them to hedge against Russian imperialism. And this is their environment, this security, the strategic environment that we start in at the collapse of the Soviet Union and the moment of Ukraine’s independence.
Krys Boyd [00:11:03] What was the mission of this entity established by the U.S. National Security Council that came to be known as the ungroup? That was, I guess, an unofficial name.
Alexander Vindman [00:11:10] It’s something that emerged in 1989 after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when the national security leadership, Bob Gates, who was later the secretary of defense under President Obama, he was then the deputy national security advisor. He started to look around at this, now slightly more real but still remote possibility of the Soviet Union collapsing. The collapse of the Berlin Wall meant that Russians or the Soviet Union lost control over Eastern Europe. Those became all independent states, not just in name, but in reality. The Soviet Union had been dominating them since then, the World War two and national security apparatus really was struggling with what happens in this really dangerous scenario that the Soviet Union collapses and has the largest or second largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and they settled on this one singular danger that you have a massive nuclear stockpile that’s not secure, that that could fall into the terrorists hands. You have this danger of the Soviet Union balkanization. This is in the area of Yugoslavia breaking up into parts and all sorts of struggles between the ethnic populations, and they settle on this idea that maybe the best approach would be to keep the Soviet Union intact. So rather than inviting all of these new countries into the fold, integrating into into democracy, into the community of nations, the initial instinct from the George H.W. Bush administration is, well, maybe the Kremlin should maintain regional hegemony. Maybe the Kremlin should maintain control over these regions. And that’s where we counsel Ukraine to do. George H.W. Bush has this famous speech in 1991, in which he travels to the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, and says, Ukrainians, we understand that you want to be independent, but slow down, no hurry. Now that Ukrainians don’t heed that they’ve been struggling for independence for decades and centuries. Really? And they vote to leave the Soviet Union in December of 1991. That ultimately leads to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could not really conceive of maintaining the integrity of the rest of Union, absent Ukraine as one of the core members.
Krys Boyd [00:13:18] Colonel Vindman, did Ukraine receive concessions of any kind for handing over the nuclear weapons that resided on its soil after the fall of the Soviet Union?
Alexander Vindman [00:13:27] Minimally, I would say that the Ukrainians looked to strike the best bargain that they could under the George H.W. Bush administration. It was really, frankly, a lot of coercion to try to get the Ukrainians to give up their nuclear arsenal. That threat of being isolated and cut off from the west, and from access to a vital economic support that all of the that region Russia, Ukraine, the other republics needed to transition from communism to market economy to capitalism. And what they attempted to try to do is extract a couple of essential elements in this bargain. The first one was they were hoping for security guarantees, if that rings a bell. It’s part of the discussion now. The Ukrainians want some security guarantees. If they were to give up on some of the territory that’s being occupied by Russia. They want to make sure that Russia doesn’t rebuild its strength and come back to snap up additional territory. They wanted the same thing back then. They also wanted economic support. But ultimately, one of the reasons that they decided to give up this arsenal is because they couldn’t frankly, manage it. It was too big. It was approaching some of it. Some of the bigger components were approaching the end of the life cycle for nuclear weapons, and the Ukrainians didn’t have control of either the ability to use them or the fuel cycle in order to make sure that they were still viable weapons. So on the one hand, they could keep them. On the other hand, they were trying to extract some sort of concessions or some sort of aid. And when Bill Clinton came in, they negotiated this kind of arrangement minus those robust security guarantees. They thought they had some assurances from the West that if Ukraine became the target of aggression, that the US and UK and Russia at the time signed on to be the guarantors of, or at least the guarantors of a discussion around protecting Ukraine? That didn’t materialize, but that’s what they fought for and made some gains in achieving back then.
Krys Boyd [00:15:20] You described Russia’s retention of nuclear weapons playing into the U.S. and Western allies reluctance to confront Russia over its actions in Georgia and Crimea, and now the rest of Ukraine, more of Ukraine. Does this posture define the kind of transactional relationship that you write about, that the U.S. has maintained with Russia for the past three decades?
Alexander Vindman [00:15:38] It’s absolutely consistent. We touched on two of the moments independence, where we tried to tamp down on Ukraine’s independence. This is the unique period in which we were hyper focused on getting Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, so much so that we worked with the Russians to come up with an idea where the Russians were going to take all those weapons, dismantle them. But it was really teaming up on against Ukraine in order to get them to give up those weapons. This kind of pattern carried forward really into the 2000s, when the Ukrainians really started to make major forays, establishing their own independent identity and attempting to integrate with the West, continued on to when the Russians started the war in 2014 to present day, where we tended to seem to strike a Russia first approach rather than any other countries in the region, even the ones that are aspiring to be more democratic, to join the fold, to be legitimate allies. And when Russia, in the same moments, was demonstrating itself to be increasingly belligerent Initially kind of leveraging its control of energy to coerce its neighbors to hybrid warfare, interfering in elections. That’s not just in its own backyard. That’s in Europe and in the US. And finally to graduating to military aggression. All these moments, we seem to be the victims of hopes and fears, hopes that we could keep Russia on side’s hopes that we could accomplish more with Russia than we could, and fears that if we condemned Russia, if we were conditional in our engagement with Russia, based on them being a good actor, that we would end up in a bad place. But by conducting the Russia first approach, we ended up there anyway because we appeased Russia. We embolden them to graduate through these mischief making, through military aggression. And this is the ultimate folly that we were transactional and shortsighted. Instead of focusing on the big picture, the long term, what really matters, which is strengthening democracies. That’s where we have strong security partnerships and economic partnerships.
Krys Boyd [00:17:36] To be clear, Ukraine did not spring to life when it gained sovereignty as a perfect, perfectly functional democracy. Can you give us some context on the sort of early growing pains there that might have fueled U.S. skepticism about Ukraine’s potential as an important ally?
Alexander Vindman [00:17:53] That’s true. To this day, Ukraine is far from a perfect democracy. But in relative terms, the trajectories of Ukraine and Russia couldn’t be further apart. Russia has worked towards authoritarianism. Ukraine has arc towards democracy. In the early days, it didn’t seem that way in the 1990s. There was an enormous amount of hope that we could achieve something called pan European security, where Russia could be actually part of the security environment, all working together to warn off threats, to deal with challenges. That was the promise in those early days that really got the US to focus in on both Russia and Ukraine. In my interviews with President Clinton and Core. They were explicit in this idea that they wanted to help usher in Russia into the community of nations, into being a capitalist democratic society, and invested what they believed was significant resources in both Russia and Ukraine. As the 1990s wore on, both countries made really difficult steps with lots of reversals Russia and Ukraine being caught up in the inability to to make this transition. Lots of crime, lots of corruption, lots of efforts to kind of take those investments from the West and pilfer them. Both Russia and Ukraine undertook these kinds of strategies. And whereas Ukraine initially captured our attention because they had a large nuclear arsenal and we wanted to transition to democracy, once they gave up their nuclear weapons, we started to lose interest. Russia, on the other hand, still had our attention with its massive nuclear arsenal, large military, largest country in the world and maintained our attention. As you get into the 2000s, the story starts to change. Ukraine starts to make more significant strides towards democracy. Russia starts to go backwards towards authoritarianism. Putin shows his true colors eliminating free media, eliminating opposition, interfering in Ukraine’s election and resulting in something called the Orange Revolution in 2004 that ushered in a new, majorly pro-Western president to lead the country. And we are still caught up in those hopes and fears when it was past time for us to to start thinking about, you know, how the landscape was changed, that Russia, even though it has all these different important features, is not going to be an ally. Ukraine could be or at least needs to be hardened against the Russian growing Russian aggression.
Krys Boyd [00:20:18] You’ve alluded to some of the reasons for this with the pan European security. It is interesting, though, given the very difficult 20th century relationship between Washington and Moscow, that the fall of the Soviet Union seems to have barely budged The US notion of the importance of Russia at the apparent end of the Cold War.
Alexander Vindman [00:20:36] We are an exceptional nation. We are a superpower. We look at the world through a superpower lens. We look at other corners of the world and identify things that seem to resemble us, other great powers, and we buy into their kind of exceptionalism. We bought into the fact that Russia was exceptional and was, in certain regards, had a unique place in the region, maybe even a privileged sphere of influence, where it could have greater authority in its own backyard. And this is dangerous. You know, Russia didn’t merit this kind of behavior, especially since it was trying to rebuild its empire. But I think it’s part of this whole superpower hubris, that we conduct relationships with great powers in this way, which is, again, another realist notion that all countries act in self-interest and maximally attempt to advance their own individual interests. If that’s the case, how do we get things done around the world. We worked through other strong reactors.
Krys Boyd [00:21:33] How did 9/11 contribute to what you call a mirage of cooperation between Russia and the United States?
Alexander Vindman [00:21:40] Putin is a sophisticated actor. He was a KGB officer. He knows how to manipulate his peers, his adversaries. And he was the first phone call that George Bush took after 9/11, where Putin pledged support and rooting out transnational terrorism. And this was something that captured the Bush administration’s attention. So in this violent attack on the United States that punctured the perception of US immunity to harm, we were looking around for ways to punish these enemies. That struck out to us. They were located in Afghanistan, and we needed to potentially cooperate with what we do. We needed to cooperate with Russia because we would have to overfly some Russian territory and some territories that the Russians had influence over in Central Asia to get access to Afghanistan. So that was one of the important areas of Putin. Ingratiating himself with Bush. Another feature was the fact that throughout that first Bush administration, the Russians did seem to indicate that they were going to help us in various corners of the world. They did that because they knew that it was important to us at the moment, and they did it just as they were also starting to escalate their own hostility to regain control over their neighborhood. They felt considerably stronger in that in the 2000, they were starting to recover economically, and they were no longer that weak nation that couldn’t help allow parts of the empire to spin off like they did in ’91. And they started to think about how to recapture this territory. So in the same moment that we were looking for aid and assistance and they offered it, they were undertaking aggression in their own backyard. And we were compelled. Or how should I say this? We suppressed the our kind of values based interest in supporting strongly democracies, including Ukraine, including in this pivotal moment in 2004 during the Orange Revolution, when the Russians attempted to steal that election and the Ukrainian population rose up in protest, forced a new round of elections, we could have at that moment doubled down, refocused our support to Ukraine. We did not do that because we were fearful about how that would affect our relationship with Russia.
Krys Boyd [00:24:01] Colonel, President Barack Obama pledged to reframe the U.S. relationship with Russia. This ambitiously titled effort, the reset. What came of that reset?
Alexander Vindman [00:24:12] Not much reset. It was just that term that the Obama administration used. But if you think about it, we’ve conducted reset policies with Ukraine or correction with Russia since the very beginning. We attempted to reset around the 90s, we attempted to reset again under George Bush. Those famous words where Bush looks into Putin’s eyes and sees a soul. We attempted to reset in and under President Obama’s administration. That was as a consequence of a war that Russia started in its own backyard, attacking its neighbor, Georgia, in the caucuses. And we felt like we needed to somehow kind of normalize the relationship that carries forward into the Trump administration. First, Trump administration also attempted a reset. Biden administration also attempted a reset. There was a famous meeting in just the summer before that. The major war started in 2022. Trump again today is looking to do another reset. So all of these resets fail to for a fundamental reason. They were contrary to Russia’s interests. Russia had really little interest but to manipulate us and to dangle the promise of normalcy and stable relationships in the Obama administration. We really gave it a pretty good effort. It may have looked less warranted, but we attempted to better understand why Russia was behaving the way it was, that it was feeling increasingly powerful in its own backyard, and it felt like I needed to have some consideration of of its own interests. But again, none of that came to reduce the threats. All of it. Of these resets really emboldened Russia and nudged us forward to 2022 and the dangers we face today.
Krys Boyd [00:25:57] So we’re still in a position of either placating Russia or simply trying to contain. Its just trying to prevent crises.
Alexander Vindman [00:26:07] We seem to be jumping from crisis to crisis. There are, of course, alternatives. I try to prescribe some of those in this book, and I think part of those are looking to harden the relationships that will warn off Russia from aggression. We should have done that. With regards to Ukraine after 2004. We should have done that after the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. Make sure that Russia’s neighbors were were capable of deterring dissuading for Russia from aggression. We should have done that in 2014, after the Russians attacked Ukraine in a second revolution that Ukraine had in Ukraine. Had a authoritarian leader come to power, Viktor Yanukovych, a character that plays a role in our own politics. Paul Manafort, who was the campaign chair for Trump in 2016, was Yanukovych’s campaign manager, also a senior advisor, and helped him persuade the Ukrainian population to elect him in 2000. In 2014, when the Ukrainians rise up against this turn towards authoritarianism, he turned back to Russia. We had the opportunity to warn off Russia from this aggressive turn. We had the opportunity to help the Ukrainians defend themselves, and we passed that up. And really, Russia’s lesson from all of these episodes is that the West doesn’t have the resolve to stand up to it. The West can be threatened or enticed into looking the other way, and we seem to now we’re in this phase with with Trump in his second administration. He’s had four years of experience working with Putin, recognizing that there is not really that much to be accomplished. What really? We didn’t rebuild bridges with Russia in the first four years, but now we’re doing this maximal turn back to Russia as if nothing happened in the past, as if none of these lessons were learned, as if Russia didn’t attack its neighbor and destabilize Europe and cause all of these other shocks. We’re now in a decidedly Russia first approach, having failed to learn the lessons of the past.
Krys Boyd [00:28:10] Colonel, what you recommend, instead of what we’ve been doing, is a foreign policy centered around and driven by American values, a thing you called neo idealism? This is not a facetious question. I have to ask, do we have shared American values for foreign policy in 2025?
Alexander Vindman [00:28:30] We seem pretty far from it at the moment. I think the answer is it’s it seems like a far flung notion right now, but that’s because we are just two weeks into a Trump administration. We have four more years to take this very, very transactional list. Chaotic approach. But on the back end, there’s going to be a different administration that comes in. I know that we’re facing deep challenges to our democracy, but on the back end, there will be another election. It’ll just be, you know, more heavily favored towards Trump, towards this kind of authoritarian bent. It’s this idea of competitive authoritarianism. Even authoritarian regimes hold elections because they want that legitimacy. We’re going to have them. The population is going to have to show up. And on the back end of that, when we have a different administration come in, they’re going to look to normalize or kind of take this to the excesses of Trump administration and bring us back to center. And I think that’s when we’re really looking at a philosophy like neo idealism, where the U.S. tries to recapture moral leadership, where the US focuses on values. We do have values. We each have our own individual values. I came from an institution, the Army, where I served for 22 years, that had institutional values. That’s something at the forefront of mind loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage. Our national values include a democracy protecting freedoms. We have setbacks, but we seem to to overcome them periodically. So we will get to a point where we need to take this the excessive swing to this transaction ality to a moralism, back to moralism going forward. And my counsel is relatively straightforward. We know where our strengths are. Our strengths are with other fellow democracies. Where we do. They also share our values, our deep held values, even though they look like they’re suppressed at the moment. Those values are critically important because once we strengthen our relationships, we will purge stability and economic prosperity. These next four years are going to be difficult. But refocusing back on your idealism, on this, on this fundamental view that we share with our fellow democracies, will allow us to frankly, recapture some of the strength that that will ab away over the course of the next several years.
Krys Boyd [00:30:47] President Trump, as we’ve discussed, is not the first U.S. leader to openly hope for and work toward more normalized or even friendlier relations with Moscow. But even those within Trump’s inner circle in his first term have subsequently admitted to being perplexed by his particular affinity for Russian and affection specifically for Vladimir Putin. Do you have a hypothesis for why Trump feels this way to a far greater extent than than any U.S. president to date?
Alexander Vindman [00:31:17] You know, I could accept or I could understand different facets that explain the portions of his behavior, but the totality is inexplicable. Well, let me explain. So he has a proclivity for authoritarians. He likes strongmen. He wants to emulate strongmen, folks that don’t have any checks on their power. He has a deep antipathy for Ukraine because, you know, when I reported his corruption, Ukraine was at the centerpiece of that. And he holds Ukraine. He holds a grudge shield. Ukraine responsible. He has this other very strange, you know, having worked in the white House, he has this strange mode of operating in exact opposition to the kinds of criticism that he faces. If he’s being accused of an insurrection. He will do everything in his power to recast that as peaceful protesters or that he won the 2020 election. He reject rejects these notions that, you know, he fell short somewhere. So that explains part of the behavior. But Fundamentally, he’s also an individual that wants to win, wants to be perceived as strong. So when you look at the actions he’s taking, he’s not taking actions that make him look strong. He’s giving away the farm to Russia before negotiations start. He’s appeasing Russia and Iran and giving him wins when he wants to be the winner. So those aspects of it are really quite puzzling as to why he’s bending over backwards to accommodate Russia when it puts him off further away from a win, when it puts him further away from a peace deal that he wants to demonstrate he’s delivered on. I don’t have an answer to that. Why he’s gone so far in just to the general currents.
Krys Boyd [00:32:54] When the President says, as he has lately, that Ukraine started the war, that it is now defending itself against. This is despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Do you have any sense about whether President Trump truly believes this, or is this again, some kind of rhetorical effort to make the case that Ukraine’s sovereignty should not matter to Americans?
Alexander Vindman [00:33:15] I think it’s the latter. I think it’s also potentially the way that he interacts with, you know, small and medium countries coercive. You know, starting from that extreme a point to, to get this deal that’s being talked about. For rare earths, he does flattery for large states and powerful men. But, you know, that includes friends and neighbors, right? He’s using the same tactics with regards to Canada and Mexico. Highly coercive. But he can’t pull that kind of nonsense with China. We slap sanctions on China. They return the favor. So he does a completely different approach. And it’s part of his kind of character, the way you negotiate. I will say that, you know, this notion of Ukraine starting anything or being, you know, belligerent at all. I served in Ukraine, in Moscow. There’s an interesting portion of the book. It’s not kind of dry policy stuff. I was responsible for understanding what the Russians were doing at the start of the war in 2014. That included multiple trips to the border between Russia and Ukraine. And at one point, I caught the Russians red handed. You know, one of those TVs chase scenes pushing their troops and their equipment across the border. It’s to me, clear as day who the belligerents are. And it’s not the Ukrainians that have fought for peace. They’re fighting for their families and their nation independence. And to vote against Ukraine and against our allies. And built with Russia in the U.N. Security Council resolution earlier this week. That is really one of the most troubling developments and most glaring example of the about face that we’re seeing in our policy.
Krys Boyd [00:34:50] What are the potential dangers of pursuing allegiance, the U.S. pursuing allegiance with Russia while shunting aside traditional allies like the EU?
Alexander Vindman [00:35:00] The principal danger is that we are in a team sport where democracies are facing off against authoritarian regimes. This is the nature of geopolitics in the early 21st century, and we are stronger together than we are apart. We might be the biggest guy on the block, but you know, if our enemies gang up against us, that poses significant challenges. We need allies. And by choosing this approach, we are breaking our relationships with our allies. The folks that will be there for us have been there for us. You know, the folks that were NATO was was reliable. Europe was reliable for us. In 2011, after we were attacked, many of those European states were willing to go to war on our behalf. Even though they didn’t, they didn’t feel right about it joining us in the Iraq war in Afghanistan. But we’re burning these bridges so we could end up in a situation where we lose our friends, our adversaries get stronger. Russia becomes increasingly belligerent. The Chinese flex their muscles in the Pacific. Potentially, they start a war to to seize territory in their own backyard. They’ve been wanting to reunite Taiwan, an independent state, as part of China. And then we are left on our own devices without friends and allies out there, that is a extremely dangerous scenario. You know, just think about schoolyard metaphor. You could be the biggest guy. But if everybody else ganging up on you, you’re in a pickle. You want your other teammates there with you to fight those battles.
Krys Boyd [00:36:24] You’ve noted that President Trump’s apparent unpredictability on the world stage could dissuade leaders of smaller, authoritarian states from taking wild actions themselves. Maybe you can talk about that.
Alexander Vindman [00:36:38] Yes. Of course. So I think the fact is that in places around the world, like for instance, in the Middle East, like Iran, that understands that the threshold for violence is quite low by the United States against Iran. Those kinds of regions, those kinds of states will be warned off. It might add a layer of stability to the Middle East, where the Iranians are not really interested in in any way kind of provoking the US based on the perceptions of our low threshold for military response. I think that other corner of the world might end up in the same place. But I wonder how relevant pacifying some of these regions are when other states are emboldened, like North Korea that has a nuclear arsenal and could be completely free from fear that the US would respond militarily because they have this ultimate security guarantee of nuclear weapons that they could employ against the US or US interests. So, yes, I think at lower, less important issues, we could see some timidity on the part of adversaries that I don’t want to pick a fight with an erratic kind of madman led United States, that there’s something called madman Theory, where the unpredictable nature of the of a leader like Nixon, for instance, a President Nixon could warn off adversaries, but that only works with, you know, kind of less important challenges. The more important ones, they’re not going to blink an eye. They also have nuclear arsenals. They don’t want to pick a fight with the United States, but they’re going to hold their ground. The Russians by no means are interested in tangling with the United States, but they also are not in a in a situation where they’re likely to be bullied by the United States. They need to be compelled. Like, for instance, if we were to help Ukraine providing additional military aid. Russia is on the tipping point where they’re having a extremely hard time in this war. Instead of easing the pain for them and easing potentially sanctions, normalizing relationships, pushing them towards that breaking point where they can’t achieve their ends on the battlefield. We support Ukraine. That’s a way to compel Russia. It’s not through, you know, any other kinds of tools? Certainly China is. It’s called our bluff on tariffs. We called for tariffs. They said they would reciprocate. So it’s useful in certain limited ways but not really when it counts, unfortunately.
Krys Boyd [00:38:59] Colonel Vindman, you are no longer working at the State Department. The Americans who are serve at the pleasure of the president, who has made it quite clear that he will happily and swiftly dismiss anyone who seems to contradict his ideas. Given that, who do you imagine in this country will develop and and make happen this kind of neo idealist thinking that you believe ought to guide U.S. foreign policy moving forward?
Alexander Vindman [00:39:27] We’re not singular in this view of a different approach. There’s neo idealism is, you know, taking root in corners of Europe, actually, not corners any more of a kind of mainstreaming in Europe that, you know, we need to focus on long term, not just transactional issues in front of us, not just at every turn looking to avoid a confrontation with Russia that emboldens them long term, but looking at the things that really matter, like supporting democracies. So the polls are a good example. Poland is a good example of a country that’s embracing some of these philosophies. Ukraine. I think Zelensky exemplifies some of these things. I think some of the other European leaders are thinking the same way. This is we shouldn’t mistake the four years of Trump are going to dispense with all of those good actors and all those and decades and frankly, centuries of the US thinking in basic humanist terms, a common good. We might have a Trump administration that believes none of that right now, and it believes only in transactional, you know, maximalist gains. But that doesn’t account for the rest of the country. That doesn’t account for large swaths of our institutions that understand that our strengths lie with our allies and folks that share our values. So they’re not, you know, they might not be able to deliver neo idealism, but those seeds and those hearts and those that direction is still there. It just will have to. It will take some time for the opportunity for to emerge is delayed. How about that?
Krys Boyd [00:41:00] Alexander Vindman is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, now senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute and leader of the Here Right Matters Foundation, which focuses on helping Ukraine win the war against Russia. His newest book is “The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself about Russia and Betrayed Ukraine.” Colonel Vindman, thank you for making time to talk.
Alexander Vindman [00:41:22] Of course. It was a pleasure. I think we covered a lot of ground. I encourage folks to go out there. There is a lot more to this story. We just covered the wave tops and a lot more of that color from being hands on in the region, talking to the policymakers, talking to the presidents, the secretaries of state. Across the Atlantic, also to explain how we got here and how we could do better.
Krys Boyd [00:41:47] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and anywhere you get podcasts or at our website. think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
