Alexander Vindman entered the spotlight in 2019. As a US army lieutenant colonel detailed to the national security council, the Ukraine-born officer listened to a 25 July phone call between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president. Vindman thought Trump’s demand, that Zelenskyy find dirt on the Bidens or lose US aid, crossed a line. He formally reported the call. In that moment, he helped trigger the first Trump impeachment.
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, a move by Vladimir Putin that Trump described as “genius” and “savvy” while calling Nato “dumb”. The swift victory contemplated by the Kremlin and Trump did not come. The war enters its fourth year.
Sadly, US support for Ukraine frays. Joe Biden is no longer in the White House, the Republicans control all three branches of government. On 28 February, an explosive Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and Zelenskyy left little doubt that US sympathies now lie with Moscow. Military and intelligence support has been suspended. Last week, the US awoke to learn that the Trump administration contemplates deporting 240,000 Ukrainian refugees.
Enter Vindman, again, with a book subtitled “How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine” and meant as an indictment of Washington’s stance toward the former Soviet republic over the last three decades and more, from George HW Bush onward.
“Starting with the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, extending throughout six US presidential administrations … US policymakers have bought fully into Russia’s vision of itself as the exceptionally and naturally dominant player in the post-Soviet space,” Vindman charges.
An embrace of “realism” as foreign policy touchstone led to turning a blind eye toward Russian aggression, Vindman contends. As a remedy, he calls for a foreign policy predicated upon a “neo-idealism”, a term coined by Benjamin Tallis, director of the Berlin-based Democratic Strategy Initiative.
According to Tallis, neo-idealism rests upon “a morally-based approach to geopolitics, grounded in the power of values conceived as ideals to strive for: human rights and fundamental freedoms, social and cultural liberalism, democratic governance; self-determination for democratic societies; and perhaps most importantly, the right of citizens in those societies to a hopeful future”.
That’s a mouthful of mush. Vindman, an Iraq war veteran, recipient of a Purple Heart for being wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED), might want to reconsider the potential wide-open commitments that come with neo-idealism, as well as the porousness of the term. On the page and with the benefit of hindsight, he refers to the Iraq war as a “mistake”. Yet he seems to have a difficult time sticking with that conclusion.
“Because the neocons’ heady aims of defeating terrorism globally, while sweeping into the Middle East and establishing democracy by military force, departed so sharply from the tightly restricted, realist-school approach of George HW Bush, those aims did reflect a kind of revived idealism.”
Point conceded? He’s not finished.
“In pursuing a war on terror, and in letting it drown out almost every other foreign-policy consideration, the neocons committed the US not to a genuinely neo-idealistic policy – tough-minded, clear, demanding of allies and opponents alike – but to an over-the-top mood of using American power to achieve a delusory totality of change, with delusory speed.”
Vindman also embraces the vision of one particular senator, from Arizona, who got Putin very right and Iraq very wrong.
“It was John McCain, the Republican candidate, who called for a total change of direction in US policy for Russia and the region,” Vindman writes.
Unlike George W Bush, McCain did not claim to have peered into Putin’s soul. Unlike Barack Obama, he did not contemplate a reset with Russia. In February 2000, during a Republican debate, McCain captured the essence of Putin.
“We know that he was an apparatchik. We know that he was a member of the KGB. We know that he came to power because of the military brutality … in Chechnya,” McCain said. “I’m very concerned about Mr Putin.”
Elsewhere in that failed presidential bid, though, McCain proclaimed support for “rogue-state rollback”. Later, he suggested that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and called for Saddam Hussein to be ousted.
Vindman omits McCain from his list of those to blame for the Iraq disaster.
McCain also offered a misplaced paean to the Libyan revolution: “I am confident that Libya’s journey to democracy will continue to inspire the entire world.” On 11 September 2012, in Benghazi, Islamic militants killed four Americans. McCain never grasped what actually happens after regimes change.
To his credit, Vindman acknowledges that events and internal governance within Ukraine added to US doubts about supporting Kyiv.
“Certain factors on the Ukrainian side … helped drive the hedging, half-measure US approach,” Vindman writes. “[A] problem for Ukraine was that despite the success of the [2004 Orange] revolution [against Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow’s candidate for president], national identity remained in a state of flux, driven by regional differences.
“Despite the advances promoting Ukrainian language and culture, the east-west divide persisted in Ukrainian elections: the east was seen as pro-Russian, with a strong economic link to Russia, the west as nationalist and pro-Western.”
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, a house divided against itself will tend to wobble, rather.
Vindman has made his case. Trump, meanwhile, acts like Tony Soprano with nukes. His deputies castigate Zelenskyy for his wardrobe, for failing to render sufficient respect. Think Silvio Dante or Paulie Walnuts, complaining that a supplicant failed to “respect the Bing”, the strip club owned by their boss.
Whether Trump eventually throws Ukraine a lifeline, and whether western Europe can find the will and strength to back Kyiv if he does not, are the questions of our time.
The Folly of Realism is published in the US by Hachette
