Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman in Toronto on March 27. Mr. Vindman believes the bigger danger is eroding deterrence and giving Russia the impression it can keep pushing until it reaches a red line that the U.S. has to defend, such as NATO.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Alexander Vindman, the man who helped set in motion the first impeachment trial against Donald Trump, says that when it comes to the U.S. administration’s approach to Russia and Ukraine, the President is repeating the worst mistakes of the past.
Mr. Vindman, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant-colonel, was in Toronto recently promoting his book The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine. Mr. Vindman was catapulted into the spotlight in 2019 after reporting and later testifying about a phone call in which Mr. Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “look into” Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Now, Mr. Vindman is cautioning of what he calls a pattern of foreign-policy missteps undertaken by successive U.S. governments when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. In an interview with The Globe and Mail in a Toronto hotel, Mr. Vindman said that the subtitle of his latest book is “unfortunately too accurate.” However, he said a tense change would have been better: how the West “deceives itself about Russia and betrays Ukraine.”
His book is a fresh take on his doctoral dissertation. Mr. Vindman was the political-military affairs officer for Russia for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and an attaché at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Most recently, he served as the director for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Russia on the White House’s National Security Council. He said that after gaining extensive experience and witnessing events firsthand, he noticed a pattern and wanted to investigate what went wrong.
He said the United States’s Russia policy has been “a combination of hopes and fears.” “It’s the hopes that we could accomplish more with Russia than we could,” he said. “The other feature is fears. We have deep-seated fears.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened nuclear war to deter the U.S. from supporting Ukraine. In November, 2024, he lowered the threshold for a nuclear attack, after saying that Ukraine had struck Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles. The revised threshold allows Russia to use nuclear weapons if it is attacked “by any non-nuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state.”
Mr. Vindman said that when the U.S. considers Russia’s threats, it should consider not just the worst-case scenario, but the likelihood of such a scenario unfolding.
“In the case of nuclear war, it’s really not that high because the Russians have no interest in a nuclear confrontation,” he said, adding that it would result in mutually assured destruction.
And the other side of the equation, Mr. Vindman added, is that the U.S. hasn’t just catered to and accommodated Russia, but has suppressed its own interests by failing to invest in Ukraine either developmentally or militarily “because we thought it might spoil or upset the apple cart with regards to the Russians.”
Mr. Vindman believes the bigger danger is eroding deterrence and giving Russia the impression it can keep pushing until it reaches a red line that the U.S. has to defend, such as NATO.
“One of the biggest dangers of the Trump administration policy is that they’re eroding this perception that collective defence and Article 5 [of the NATO treaty] are ironclad. And this might be something that the Russians test and then the U.S. will, hopefully, live up to its obligations,” he said.
“Trump is, basically, because he doesn’t understand or care to understand the lessons of history, is repeating the worst mistakes of the past,” Mr. Vindman said.
He said if the U.S. had a “Russia first” policy consistently over the past 35 years, Mr. Trump is “a different kind of animal. He is completely willing to discard Ukraine. He doesn’t care about what that means for Russia, seeing opportunities and vulnerabilities in our breakup with Europe, so it’s part of the same pattern also but it’s just such an amplified and magnified version of it.”
Mr. Vindman said that depending on how things unfold, Russia may still think it has the advantage in a long-term attritional war. He thinks that’s misplaced. He said it’s likely Russia will assess how it is doing at the end of 2026, and see if it is time to take what it has, and “come back for another bite later.” But so far, he said, the costs have been high.
“If they walk away with a win, and Trump helps deliver that win, that they couldn’t achieve on the battlefield, lifting sanctions, breaking NATO, then it’s a really huge impetus for continued military aggression. It’s a signal to other adversaries around the world that actually it pays to wage war on neighbours and conduct empire building.”
Mr. Vindman said Mr. Trump sees Ukraine as “a source of pain and embarrassment.” He said he blames Ukrainians for a couple of things, such as denouncing a previous proposal that Russia be given Crimea, and he blames Ukraine for not giving him what he wanted by delivering some dirt on the Bidens.
He said that while Mr. Trump has an affinity for Russia, Russia will continue to manipulate him, and eventually it will embarrass Mr. Trump and that’s when things might change.
“Right now, they’re all in on trying to see if they can make these peace talks work. I don’t think they’re going to yield results because the Russians are not willing to compromise.”
Mr. Vindman said he believes that the peace talks will continue for quite some time.
With a report from Reuters