Alexander Vindman: The Supreme Court decision gives license to Trump to believe that he could act with impunity. It gives him the belief that he can order the military to do what he wishes and get away with it. That’s the key part of it. It’s not . . .

If the Supreme Court intended it to be, after the fact, to determine whether the president is culpable, that’s not the way authoritarian leaders or strongmen or demagogues view situations. They see that as a permission slip.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit.

My guest today is Alexander Vindman. Vindman served as the Director for European Affairs on the United States National Security Council from 2018 until 2020. In that position, he was one of the federal government’s leading political and military experts on Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and several other former Soviet states.

Since retiring from the military with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he has earned a PhD in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, where he’s also now a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute in the School of Advanced International Studies. He heads a think tank, the Institute for Informed American Leadership; and a foundation, the Here, Right Matters Foundation. And he’s also a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation.

As you’ll hear in this conversation, Vindman has extremely deep knowledge of Russia and Ukraine. That’s important for two reasons. First, if you have any interest in this part of the world or the war that those two nations have been fighting for the last several years, there are very few people as well qualified as Vindman to explain the reasons for this conflict. And as a national security expert, he can also help us understand why it matters for the United States. I found this conversation extremely helpful in informing my understanding of Ukraine and Russia’s troubled relationship, and I hope you feel the same.

The second reason Vindman’s knowledge is important is because we need knowledgeable and smart people in our government. Of course, in a democracy, elected officials are ultimately responsible for setting policy; but nonelected, nonpartisan experts also play important roles by helping to inform decision-making and keeping government offices running smoothly through changes of administrations and priorities. The importance of these civil servants is specifically because they are nonpolitical, and their knowledge and advice is not shaped by partisan politicking.

So if at any point while listening to this interview you have the thought, “Wow. This guy really knows his stuff”—maybe when he runs through about a thousand years of Ukrainian history in about five minutes, for example—it’s worth reflecting on why Vindman is no longer serving in federal government.

Of course, his story is pretty unusual. In 2019, he was one of the whistleblowers who reported a White House scheme to pressure Ukraine to damage Joe Biden’s reputation, and he ended up serving as a key witness in impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump that year. As a result of his participation in that impeachment inquiry, he felt sidelined and pressured to retire from the military.

That’s a unique story, but—as Vindman points out in this interview—there’s a larger threat against professional, nonpolitical government administrators. You may have heard of Project 2025, which is a plan developed by the Heritage Foundation for what a conservative presidential administration might look like.

Much of Project 2025 is based on the idea that the president should fire large numbers of traditionally nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with political loyalists. That means a federal government with fewer people like Alexander Vindman, experts whose primary loyalty is to the country rather than to any particular president and who are willing to push back on bad ideas or even to blow the whistle on corruption or other severe problems.

I’m happy to have Alexander Vindman on this podcast. He’s a really smart guy, and I think you’ll find this an interesting conversation. But I also think the country would be better off if he were still serving in government, helping to inform our military and foreign policy.

Alexander Vindman has had a unique experience with Donald Trump, and that experience led to him feeling pushed out of a military career he had spent two decades building. So it’s no wonder that he has a strong opinion of Trump, and that very much comes through in this conversation.

The Kettering Foundation is a nonpartisan organization, so we’re not endorsing all of Vindman’s views. But we do think his perspective is worthy of consideration, and we hope you’ll feel the same.

It’s also worth mentioning that this conversation was recorded before the July 13th attempt to assassinate Trump. However harsh Vindman’s criticisms, certainly nothing here is intended to endorse violence. To quote the statement the Kettering Foundation released after the assassination attempt: “Political violence is never acceptable. We must work toward a future where everyone can engage in the democratic process without fear.”

One last thing. If you enjoy the show, please make sure to subscribe. And if you really enjoy it, help us out by leaving a rating or a review, tell a friend about this show, or even send them this episode with Alexander Vindman.

Alex Lovit: Alexander Vindman, welcome to The Context.

Alexander Vindman: Alex, thanks for having me on. Looking forward to the conversation.

Alex Lovit: In 2019, you became a nationally prominent figure, a fame it doesn’t seem you sought or expected, during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. With all the political drama we’ve seen in the last five years since then, it’s easy to forget that first impeachment, which concerned a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What you heard on that call disturbed you so much that you reported it to officials at the National Security Council and, ultimately, ended up serving as a key witness in congressional impeachment proceedings. Can you remind us of the content of that call and what you found so disturbing about it that you thought it needed to be reported to your superiors?

Alexander Vindman: Sure. So yesterday, actually, was the five-year anniversary of a meeting in the West Wing of the White House between Ambassador John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor, and Ukraine’s national security advisor, Oleksandr Danylyuk.

I facilitated/orchestrated that meeting to help advance the U.S./Ukraine agenda based on a strategy that I had developed in conjunction with the entirety of the U.S. government on how we could strengthen Ukraine to ensure Ukraine can better resist Russian aggression; in better resisting Russian aggression, stabilizing Europe’s eastern flank, preventing a larger-scale war unfolding.

So this is a strategy that I had been developing for . . . In my Pentagon days, I wrote the U.S./Russia strategy, national military strategy. I was recruited into the White House to be able to amplify that strategy for a hold government. And when I was in the White House, arriving there in July of 2018, I had spent the next year kind of figuring out: How do we deal with a Russia-threat-actor Russia adversary? And I settled on trying to harden Ukraine, which was already embroiled in a war since 2014, and making sure that war didn’t spill over.

So that takes me to the five-year anniversary. What ended up happening in this meeting in the West Wing was the first of a culmination of a corrupt scheme in which U.S. domestic politics infringed on U.S. national security interests.

For the preceding months—we’re talking about July 10th, 2019—I had been witnessing a political scheme unfold in which the president and his henchmen were orchestrating a scheme to steal the 2020 election. The way they were planning on doing that was to cast a shadow over the candidacy of then former Vice President Joe Biden.

They were going to couch him as corrupt. They were going to say that he was under investigation by the Ukrainian government and then use that to severely degrade Biden’s candidacy relatively early on—before he caught fire in South Carolina in the primary in 2020. I think it was February/March. They thought this was the best way to cast a shadow over Biden.

And over the course of the preceding months prior to July 10th, 2019, this scheme was unfolding outside of [the] national security channel, in which it was Trump’s political henchmen, like Rudy Giuliani, attempting to advance the scheme. But on this July 10th meeting, it actually came into official channels.

What ended up happening was Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the E.U., who really didn’t have any role, kind of forced himself into this meeting. In the course of the conversation about how to move the relationship forward, Olex Danylyuk, the national security advisor for Ukraine, was specifically talking about Ukraine being a bulwark against Russian aggression, making sure that Russia’s destabilizing activities didn’t affect our key alliances in Europe, whether that’s NATO or our partnerships with the E.U.

At the end of Olex’s comments, Gordon Sondland, acting on behalf of the president’s interests, rolled out the scheme: In order to advance the relationship, in order to get a meeting between Zelenskyy and Trump, the Ukrainians would have to announce that they were conducting an investigation into Joe Biden, at which point the meeting ended very abruptly. And then I proceeded to argue with this ambassador about the fact that we were not going to execute this corrupt scheme.

That was the first time I reported this abuse of power. At that point, I reported it as, again, Trump’s henchmen; attributed it to the president’s chief of staff, a guy named Mick Mulvaney; but did not directly say it was the president because that was a very high bar for me. That didn’t really unfold until about two weeks later, when you had the infamous phone call and the president himself kind of self-implicated himself in this corrupt scheme to steal our 2020 election.

Alex Lovit: So a lot of the stuff you’re talking about is a matter of public record, and it’s a matter of public record in large part because of your testimony and reporting what you heard. So it’s just an established fact that the Trump Administration was withholding congressionally appropriated aid from Ukraine.

And we also have not a transcript but a summary of a call between Trump and Zelenskyy, where Trump is clearly trying to pressure Zelenskyy to announce investigations into Joe Biden.

Alexander Vindman: Alex, to make this crystal clear for the folks that are listening: The call and President Trump’s demand for an investigation triggered the impeachment inquiry and resulted in the impeachment of Donald Trump for abuse of power. That’s exactly the thread.

This is when you have this very odd, ahistorical moment in which Mitt Romney, from the Republican side, joins with the Democrats in the Senate and says that yes, Donald Trump did execute this abuse of power. It then meets the threshold to remove the president or to censure him. But you had this finding in which the president did abuse his power attempting to steal the U.S. 2020 election.

Alex Lovit: Well, yeah. But as you were pointing out, back in 2020, with Mitt Romney being the sole exception, the Republican Party voted to acquit Donald Trump. Republicans had control of the Senate at that time, and so the vote fell short of the requirement for removal from office. And now, five years later, Trump is leading in the polls to retake the White House. How do you think about this?

Alexander Vindman: I think there is a portion of the American population that doesn’t care. These are the firebrand, stalwart MAGA “president could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it” folks that represent a distinct minority of the population.

The bulk of Americans don’t understand. Some don’t care but, I think, mainly don’t understand about how much consistency there is in Trump’s corruption: that Impeachment 1 is actually, in fact, connected to Impeachment 2, another effort to steal the 2020 election and retain power; and connected to the Ukraine war.

Because it was Impeachment 1 casting a shadow over the U.S./Ukraine relationship, Impeachment 2 further dividing the U.S. body politic, and leading an insurrection, weakening the U.S. that culminated in Putin believing there was an opportunity to attack Ukraine. That is a clear consistency.

But that also plays forward to today. Ukraine is almost kind of irrelevant. You could substitute Country X. It’s whatever vehicle was going to allow Trump to retain power at any cost. So you have that going forward to today: that he’s willing to invite our adversaries, like Russia or China, to dig up dirt or interfere in our elections and spread disinformation. Whatever it is, there’s a high degree of consistency in what Trump has been doing all along. And I think the American public, not steeped in some of these details, just misses it.

Alex Lovit: The Supreme Court has recently ruled on the issue of presidential immunity, and there’s been a lot of talk about the so-called SEAL Team 6 scenario: that a president could order the military to assassinate a political rival. Under many people’s reading of the Supreme Court decision, I think the court has, in fact, created absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for such an act.

So that’s pretty shocking, but that question of criminal immunity is really about accountability after the fact. The immediate question in a scenario like that is whether a president ordering the military to commit domestic political violence—you know, how the military would respond to that.

You have a deep background and history with the military. How do you think the armed forces would react if, for example, a president were to invoke the Insurrection Act and call on troops to squash peaceful protests within the United States?

Alexander Vindman: Let me start by saying that the Supreme Court decision gives license to Trump to believe that he could act with impunity. It gives him the belief that he can order the military to do what he wishes and get away with it. That’s the key part of it. It’s not . . .

If the Supreme Court intended it to be, after the fact, to determine whether the president is culpable, that’s not the way authoritarian leaders or strongmen or demagogues view situations. They see that as a permission slip.

But with regards to the military, I think there is going to be a deep resistance to use political violence against the civilian population, and that the military leadership will see that as a breach of their oath that they swore to the Constitution—but they will have to now consider it in the context of the SCOTUS decision.

The folks that have the means to dive into the topic would understand that the president has, basically, unlimited Article II powers for employment of the military, and potentially they may judge that that would be a lawful order from the president.

So you would have . . . In the opening days of the president choosing to use the military to conduct political violence against the population, you would have a play between those that feel like it’s something that they have to do because it’s the commander in chief ordering it and those that would resist.

But the shocking thing is that the president could easily dispense with the resistance. He could fire all of those leaders that would initially resist and find somebody that would be a loyalist and that would execute those orders.

And very quickly we could unravel to a situation in which the checks within the military, and those that would be adhering to their values and ethics and adhering to what their understanding of the Constitution is, would be set aside for folks that would fulfill the president’s orders to kill American citizens.

That is a deeply disturbing development, and we quickly could see a world in which we no longer have a president checked by other branches of government but, basically, a king acting with impunity.

Alex Lovit: Well, I was hoping you’d give me a more reassuring answer to that one. And so it sounds like it’s pretty important that we elect a president that we can be confident won’t attempt to use powers in that way.

Alexander Vindman: Absolutely. And I think—you know, people should not be mistaken. If you asked me this question several weeks ago, I would say that without this license for absolute immunity, you would have a higher tolerance for folks to resist.

I have been thinking about it in my own context. What would this have meant for me reporting presidential corruption in 2019? I would have been less decisive. And I would have to be more reflective, even though I understood it to be corruption. And I think a lot of people would look at it the same way.

And it’s not just about SCOTUS and this decision that they had with regards to Trump. It’s also about the plan, Project 2025, which seeks to eliminate resistance to the president’s extreme agenda. That’s what’s concerning me.

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. So during this time period we’re talking about, in 2019, you were a career military officer with more than two decades of service under both Republican and Democratic administrations. And it was through that service that you developed the expertise to make high-level strategic decisions and be in the position you were in, which is a pretty high-level position: listening in on phone calls between the president of the United States and the president of Ukraine, and helping to develop strategic policy documents related to that relationship.

So now, as you’re talking about, this concept of independent military and civil service has come under attack in this Project 2025 document which is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Can you talk about the importance of nonpartisan expertise in government and how you see Project 2025 as a threat to that?

Alexander Vindman: So if people remember back five years ago to those impeachment hearings, one of the things I take some amount of pride in is the showcasing of the excellence of nonpartisan public servants. What ended up happening in the impeachment hearings is a parade of career public servants with decades of service showcasing their expertise, their knowledge, their professionalism.

And that’s what a career in public service generally breeds. Most people don’t necessarily recognize it. There’s a lot of rhetoric around “bloated government,” “ineffective,” “lazy,” and things of that nature. That’s not what was showcased in those impeachment hearings, and I was very proud to be a part of that cohort.

What Project 2025 and the specific intent to pass a Schedule F act or executive order would allow is for the president to very, very quickly fire thousands, tens of thousands, of these career public servants and replace them with loyalists. The only measure of effectiveness, the only valuable skill that they offer is their blind loyalty to Donald Trump and his agenda.

So what you very quickly would have is, first of all, you would have massive upheaval in the professional class across all branches of government. These folks that have been in position and would be technical experts—you know, nerds—on the minutiae of environmental policy, nuclear policy, trade control—everything that you could imagine that allows us to work effectively, those folks would be set aside for folks that would know far less, not have that kind of expertise.

But more importantly, the expertise would be irrelevant because their only role would be to implement a top-down, guardrail-free extremist agenda, and that’s the second Trump Administration. That’s what it would look like.

Alex Lovit: You’re talking here about a couple of risks that Schedule F and replacing career federal bureaucrats with . . . And I think we need to reclaim the word “bureaucrat.”

Alexander Vindman: Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Lovit: But replacing those folks with political appointees, political loyalists. And a couple of those risks are, one, that there’s less likely going to be somebody in that room that might hear corruption, might report corruption; and two, that the people in that room are less likely to have expertise, real expertise, on the critical issues affecting the country.

So you’re an expert in national security, international affairs. Can you just quickly sketch for us: What are the major risks that the United States faces right now in the international arena? So why is it so important to have people that really know this stuff in the room?

Alexander Vindman: So I should probably fill in a little bit about the fact that the civil servant class is apolitical. That means they are not driven by the policy agenda of the president. There’s a layer above them of political appointees—that when the president is elected, he has pretty darned broad powers, and he selects his senior leadership; and then those folks provide direction on down to the folks that implement that policy.

But what you have is almost a kind of natural tension between that political class and the apolitical public servants that understand the rules, regulations, implications—the effects of putting people into camps and rounding up millions of immigrants, whether that’s economic, the human toll of separating families and the fact that, to date, we still have parents separated from their children from a decision that was made five years ago or so.

People that would understand, have that deep expertise. And that tension kind of gets resolved. The bureaucracy fills in and implements policy that’s not illegal, at minimum. You wouldn’t have that in a second Trump Administration. You would probably have a significant straying into the illegal sphere.

With regards to the challenges that we’re facing and how instituting Schedule F and eliminating career public servants would play out [is] I saw some of this firsthand. After I was fired from the White House, my position was filled by a loyalist that didn’t speak any of the foreign languages that fell in my portfolio—didn’t speak Russian, didn’t speak Ukrainian.

Didn’t have a decade or two of expertise working out of the embassies in Ukraine and Russia. Hadn’t received advanced degrees. I did my master’s at Harvard in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia studies. Didn’t have the relationships with the State Department, the Department of Defense. Hadn’t been steeped in the strategy.

All that person’s credibility was is that, again, they served on the Trump campaign and were going to fulfill the president’s mandates. At that level, this is not a junior bureaucrat. This is a pretty senior role. As the director on the National Security Council, you’re synchronizing all of government to advance policy. That’s the president’s policy, but it’s in a way that makes sense as a rational—takes into consideration the deep standing relationships. You would not be able to do that.

So let me give you an example, now going forward. Trump is talking about instituting tariffs on multiple different countries: our allies in Europe, our chief trading partners, and China. And the effects of that kind of tariff policy would be that the costs would go up on goods for the U.S. consumer. It wouldn’t really generate significant revenues for our budget.

What it would do is it would start a trade war of sorts in which you have the globe delinking into pockets, islands of economic activity. That would significantly depress our economic growth and then, ultimately, reduce our tax base for defense, for our Social Security programs, everything else.

And in this world in which Trump has a second term, you basically don’t have people saying, “This is not a good idea. These are the costs,” providing some guidance on, if the president insists on implementing this policy, how to do it in a way that reduces blowback and still advances the president’s interests.

You wouldn’t have that. You wouldn’t have bureaucrats in a positive sense. We were reclaiming that word. Nobody would be providing that layer of knowledge and the consequences of decisions to check extremely ill-conceived ideas.

One of the things about the Trump Administration is that the president would often issue instructions and very, very frequently quickly wheel them back when he received advice about the consequences of his decisions. This happened in the context of his idea of withdrawing support for the Kurds in Northern Syria when they were fighting ISIS. And this caused Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to resign.

But the consequences of that decision in our fight to defeat ISIS, this heinous terrorist organization, were going to be undone if the president actually moved forward with this idea.

But the bureaucracy said—the public servants—you know, this class of experts said, “This is dangerous to your own . . . Mr. President, Donald Trump, this is dangerous to your own objectives to defeat terrorism; so therefore, we need to make some adjustments,” and the president would move backwards and change his mind. We would not have any of these checks in the system to prevent worst-case scenarios.

Alex Lovit: Well, speaking of the value of independent expertise in government, you were one of the American government’s leading experts, specifically on Russia and Ukraine. And as a result of your role in the Trump impeachment, you felt pressured to retire from the Army in 2020. And that’s a real loss to the American government, especially given how events have transpired in Russia and Ukraine since that time.

But the federal government’s loss is our podcast listeners’ gain. So I want to ask you, as, really, one of the leading experts on this region of the world, to help us understand what’s going on here. You mentioned previously Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and then a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Can you help us understand the trajectory between those two events? And what are Russia’s motivations?

Alexander Vindman: So I would want your listeners to understand that there is a deep history between Russia and Ukraine, a shared history for large swaths of time, a claimed common root that dates back a thousand years to the establishment of what was called Kievan Rus on the capital of Ukraine, Kiev, as a Slavic power in that part of the world in a moment where, frankly, Russia didn’t even exist.

When Kievan Rus was established more than a thousand years ago, Russia was a forest region absent of population and would remain so for several hundred years. When Russia did rise as a power, it was when Kievan Rus power was dwindling. And Kievan Rus was sacked by the Mongol Horde that, basically, obliterated most of that regional power, creating space for Moscow to emerge as a regional power.

So that takes us into the early 13th century. You jump forward another 300 years to about the 17th century. At this point, Russia is one of the leading powers in the region. What we see as Ukraine is carved up between different kingdoms. So you have Poland, which is a regional power to the north; the Russians to the northeast; and the Ottoman Empire to the south.

And there you start to see almost a consolidation of identity, where the Ukrainians are trying to fight for their independence. You have the Cossack tribesmen actually looking for allies to carve out their own independence and fend off the Polish Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire, and they seek accommodation with the Kremlin. They were like, “Okay. You guys look like us, share a common religion. We’re Slavs. How about we work together? You could beat back these empires that you’re fighting against also, but you’d also achieve our own aspirations for independence.”

Anyway, Russia took that kind of marriage of convenience as a permanent change to the situation and that Russia has had the authority and the mandate to control the region. So from, really, the middle of the 17th century on, Ukraine has been fighting for independence; Russia has been fighting for regional control.

And now we’re going to jump forward quite a ways, into the 20th century. Russia is controlling different parts of this Ukrainian territory. Not all of it, to be clear. There are parts of it that still are resident in other kingdoms. But this feeling in Ukraine is so strong that when the Russian Empire collapses in 1917, there is a fight and a demand for a Ukrainian state. And in order for the Soviets to gain control over this region, they have to come up with an accommodation with Ukraine where Ukraine actually stays—becomes communist, but it stays kind of a semi-independent, semi-autonomous state.

And they do this for 15 different republics because there’s a demand for some level of autonomy. That was the seed of the collapse of the Soviet Union, this regional autonomy. And when the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, it’s because Ukraine chooses to withdraw from the Soviet Union, says that it does not want to be part of this entity and will march off in its own direction.

You have the leadership of the Soviet Union saying, well, we—if there is no Ukraine as part of this union, there is no union. Ukraine is the beating heart. It’s central to Russian identity. Russia believes that, integral to Russia is Great Russia, the Kremlin and what Russia looks like—much like today—Belarus, the White Russians, and Malorussia, Little Russia, which is Ukraine.

Since this collapse that unfolded in 1991, Russia has been struggling to define itself and can’t seem to define itself without these entities, Belarus and Ukraine. What you really have is a struggle from 1991 forward on how Russia can envision itself moving forward. And they can’t without Ukraine.

So in moments of weakness or when they can, they attempt to assert authority. They tried to do that in the Orange Revolution in 2004 when they put their fingers on the scale, put—pour hundreds of millions of dollars into making sure that their candidate moves forward to become the president of Ukraine.

This is the first revolution that Ukraine has in the 21st century. The Ukrainians reject that corruption. They reject Russia’s involvement. And they institute a Western government.

And then, in 2014, what you have is the next iteration of revolution unfolding when you have a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine saying, “Forget about the aspirations of the Ukrainian people and their desire to be part of Western Europe, eventually the European Union and the prosperity of the European Union.”

That government flees after trying to use military force to suppress the Ukrainian population. And in this moment of turmoil when there isn’t really a Ukrainian president when the military is weak, when everything is looking to unravel, Russia first steps in and seizes Crimea and puts troops into Eastern Ukraine.

So they move from putting economic pressure, political pressure throughout the ‘90s up to the Orange Revolution. Those tools didn’t work. So then, they choose to use military force in order to achieve their objectives of rolling Ukraine back in.

And they thought that they achieved those goals in 2014 when they thought that they may have realized a failed Ukrainian state minus Crimea, minus Eastern Ukraine. But Ukraine cauterized that wound, continued to march forward.

And they looked for the next opportunity that emerged in 2022 when the West looked distracted, when the West looked fractured, when there was seemingly a permission slip for Putin to conduct this war because the Republicans were taking the side of Russia and Putin based on Trump’s own sentiments rather than Ukraine, a struggling democracy. And Russia launched this full-scale war.

So I just ran us through about 1,000 years of history as to how long this tension between Russia and Ukraine has been going on and Ukraine’s efforts for independence have been going on, especially recently in a concerted manner.

Alex Lovit: Well, thank you for that. I’m a history guy. So I appreciate that. Yeah. That is a lot of information presented concisely and I think also a demonstration of the expertise that people like you bring to the government.

Alexander Vindman: That’s a summary of my next book, by the way, which is coming out in February. So you got a snapshot of it there.

Alex Lovit: I will plug it. What’s the title?

Alexander Vindman: The Folly of Realism, How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine. But it’s the folly of realism, this idea that, you know, we could come to an accommodation with Putin and authoritarian regimes instead of acting on our values and looking to nurture and develop democracies.

Alex Lovit: The way that you’ve just told that story of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, as you say over 1,000 years, a lot of that is about identity and how Russian identity has, in some ways, included this imperial ambition and then Ukrainian developing a national identity. How do you see the development of Ukrainian identity over the last few decades since the breakup of the Soviet Union?

Alexander Vindman: So it’s an interesting story about the development of Ukraine over the past 30 years. Ukraine started with what I would say are existential challenges. Those existential challenges emerged from this deep history with Russia, the fact that Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union.

And networks were tied in a hub-and-spoke system from the periphery, even like the core periphery like Ukraine, to Russia and the Kremlin. That’s transportation networks. That’s economic networks. That’s gas flows. That’s industrial production, everything.

So it started with those challenges and trying to diversify and build linkages west was a major economic challenge. It started with the fact that it really lacked a competent civil service and professional class because the former Soviet Republic really did not manage defense. They did not manage foreign affairs. They did not manage economics independently of the center, which was Moscow.

So they had to rebuild basically from scratch. And that was a very, very difficult transformation certainly through the ‘90s, building that political class, developing its own identity.

But they actually did slowly and surely move in that direction. Certainly in a social/societal perspective, they did that. The language of the state became Ukrainian. That means all the students learned Ukrainian. They learned Ukrainian history. They developed a Ukrainian identity.

And while these systemic challenges were being dealt with, at minimum the question of identity was being resolved with the Ukrainians understanding that they are their own separate, distinct people, not Little Russians, as the Russian elite saw them.

You see that play out in the tension between the high degree of corruption and this ambiguity from the Ukrainian elites in the ‘90s and early 2000s about which direction to go into, whether to stay in the Russia bloc or further integrate with the West.

But the population was on a different trajectory, a much more aggressive trajectory based on their own understanding of identity. Now, part of that is because the population started in a different spot.

In December of 1991, the population voted overwhelmingly—90 percent of Ukraine’s population voted to break free of the Soviet Union. That is a shocking number. There was only one place where it was somewhat close but still ended up being over 50 percent of the population in Crimea voting for Ukraine to be independent.

But the aggregate of the population, a country of about 50 million all coming together and saying, we are our own separate country. We don’t want to be part of the Soviet Union.

So that’s where they’re starting with the population and developing, gaining an understanding and the government, the bureaucracy, the institutions moving very, very slowly but inching forward in that same direction, just lagging behind the population.

And the Orange Revolution in 2005 was kind of a seminal moment in which there was a hard break away from the pro-Russian camp and towards a Western view of Ukraine. And 2014 was the next seminal moment in this move towards Western integration where the population, aggressively willing to risk their lives, rejected the idea of being subordinate to Russia and Russia’s camp.

And that identity—there was still a great deal of tension between the Russian-speaking Ukrainians—because they are all Ukrainians—but the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the south and the east and the Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians in west and center.

There was kind of a consistent divide in that first 20, 25 years. That disappeared entirely after 2014. And what you had is a consolidation of the population around this idea that we are Ukrainians. We are not part of Russia. And that carried on through even more so after 2022.

What’s interesting about this is—the reason I paint the picture this way is I want to make sure the listeners understand that there was a consistent kind of trend line towards a strengthened Ukrainian identity and independence.

But the moments where it kind of surged was in the face of aggression. So if there was still some ambiguity in 2005, it started to whittle away after Russia tried to interfere in that election and steal that election.

It whittled away further in 2014 when Russia basically strong-armed the Ukrainian leadership to remain in the Ukrainian camp and then proceeded to seize and occupy Ukrainian territory, further consolidation.

In 2022, basically Ukraine cast off all of those brotherly or cousin ties towards Russia, the former imperial center and utterly rejected their connections to Russia so, yes, gradual but almost like punctuated by these surges in national identity in rejection of Russian aggression.

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how Ukraine and Russia have played out in American politics. This has become something of a dividing line with the Democratic party mostly supporting aid for Ukraine, the Republican party more divided on that issue.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that, if he had remained president in 2022, Russia never would have invaded Ukraine. He has also repeatedly said that, if he is elected this year, he will end the war within 24 hours.

Do you have any sense of what he means by these statements? And what do you think the policies of a second Trump administration would look like with regard to Ukraine?

Alexander Vindman: Trump was the president from 2016 to 2020 when there was an active hot war between Russia and Ukraine. Trump did not resolve that issue even though he had some intentions and put some of his own energies behind this—you know, not a lot, but he put some of his own energies behind it.

So he failed then. The idea that he could somehow come into power and end the war in 24 hours is just patently absurd. He failed to do it for four years. How would he do it now?

Certainly, he couldn’t strong arm the Ukrainians into giving up their sovereignty. Even if he were to completely cut off Ukraine’s—by the way, they have had some experience with that recently if you think about the fact that we suspended all aid for a period of—what—close to nine months—eight or nine months between September of 2023 to April of 2024.

They were fighting on their own with EU support. So they have some experience in going it alone. They did it alone basically entirely in the first four months of the war in 2022. And from the Ukrainian standpoint, they believe they could effectively resist Russia.

They’re doing it today. Russia is throwing masses of troops at Ukraine, bombarding cities. And the Ukrainians have been weathering that and inflicting massive casualties. I mean, some of the credible numbers out there are absolutely staggering, over 500,000 killed and wounded.

Some estimates say maybe even as high as 700,000 killed and wounded—Western estimates. So he can’t pressure the Ukrainians. And Russia—you know, Russia would agree to something that amounts to a capitulation, which is basically the U.S. announcing that they would complete sever all support to Ukraine and accept a situation in which Russia retains its occupied territories.

They would potentially accept that. But you know, you need to have both parties in the war accept the terms in order for it to end. So it’s silly. It sounds like a kindergartner solution to a major geopolitical challenge.

And it’s the same thing that any kind of authoritarian demagogue does which is offer pleasing solutions that are completely unsubstantiated or untethered to reality.

Alex Lovit: So you obviously don’t have a whole lot of respect for the policy proposal there. But Trump is channeling perhaps an isolationist mood of some of his supporters, this kind of idea of, “Well, it’s too bad what’s happening to Ukraine. But what does it have to do with us?” or, similarly, kind of questions about what NATO provides for the United States.

Can you help sketch the—what are the risks to the United States? How does NATO help protect us?

Alexander Vindman: So first, let me say that I don’t think he’s actually channeling the majority of the U.S. population. The credible polling I’ve seen suggests that 75 percent of the population continues to support Ukraine.

And that is an erosion of where support was as the war started. But it’s mainly because of the capture of the Republican party over swaths of the population and the use of disinformation about Ukraine being Nazi or corrupt that are, again, not tethered to reality.

So you say something enough times—and this is why propaganda is effective—and that permeates and erodes the broader support in a society that, you know, even more overwhelmingly than 75 percent supported Ukraine.

So what that tells me is that, actually, I don’t think a lot of that is hard opposition to Ukraine. I think a fair bit of it is probably soft opposition from that remaining 25 percent with a different Republican leadership that would change their views.

With regards to what’s at risk with regard to this war, I talk about it as a system-defining war that will determine whether the 21st century or certainly the next decades of the 21st century are defined by authoritarianism gaining strength or democracy resurgent.

The reason that that’s the case is you would have a world in which Russia being successful—you would have a scenario in which the strong would be enticed to believe that they could prey on the weak without consequence, without resistance from the democratic world.

So that doesn’t extend just to Russia and its neighborhood. That extends to places like China and Taiwan. That extends to an Iran that potentially is more belligerent in its neighborhood, certainly with regard to proxy warfare. We see some of that seeping in now with regard to the Israel-Hamas war.

But let’s [neck] this down to something even more concise: Europe. Europe is the bedrock of US prosperity. It is our most important trading partner, our most important ally from a national security and defense perspective.

Some of US and EU economic power dwarfs any other—you know, we’re talking about somewhere in the ballpark of about $50 trillion, which amounts to a significant portion—you know, the majority of the world’s wealth.

And Russia being successful in Ukraine would mean greater instability, greater threats, higher possibility of a confrontation in Europe, undermining the stability required for economic prosperity, for trade and everything else.

And if we extrapolate the U.S. not doing enough at the moment—because I think the U.S. could be doing more leading the charge to support Ukraine.—in a Trump scenario, we actually have a more dire situation.

We have a signal to the authoritarian world, the authoritarian world can return to the rules of the jungle and that US absent or withdrawn from NATO leaves Europe on its own to fend off Russia with a much, much higher possibility of spillover into a broader European war in which Russia very well could seek to test the resolve of a NATO-collective defense.

Or putting maximum pressure on Russia and the theory that Russia absorbing Ukraine becomes that much more powerful and threatening would then march forward to reestablish other parts of the Russian Empire.

Alex Lovit: People tend to think of authoritarianism and democracy as polar opposites. But Putin first won the presidency—the Russian presidency in competitive elections before enlarging the powers of that office to punish opponents, to squash dissent.

Ukraine also has some history of electing leaders with authoritarian tendencies. Do you think the US can learn anything from this history? What does it look like for an authoritarian to take office through democratic elections? And what warning signs might indicate that a leader is dismantling democratic structures?

Alexander Vindman: That’s a superb question because I think there is a misconception that it takes something as violent as a military coup to bring into power an authoritarian. That wasn’t the case in China. China was—let’s be clear. China was an authoritarian communist regime but a very different-looking authoritarian communist regime pre-Xi Jinping.

And he was able to, you know, in his own system, be elected by the Communist Party and then seize much, much broader powers. In Russia’s context, clear—actually, Russia was a struggling democracy in the ‘90s.

And Putin was elected—popularly elected. And he was popularly elected in 2004. And he was popularly elected by thinner margins in 2012 and, increasingly, kind of drew powers to himself where he became unchecked and increasingly authoritarian.

We have a blueprint in which something similar could happen in the United States. We have an almost 250-year democracy with really quite strong institutions. But we have a blueprint in Trump’s Plan 47 or Project 2025 to dismantle those institutions.

And we have a leader, the nominee for the Republicans and potentially at this point given the tumult at the top of the Democratic ticket, likely next president of the United States, gawd forbid, that has already said that he’s willing to be a dictator, that he’s looking to ensure that the checks and balances that restrained him in his last term or the historical checks and balances in our government for the preceding 250 years are not there anymore.

And somebody that says that they’re wil—going to be a dictator for a day is something that intends to be a dictator for life. So I think we have all of the hallmarks of a very dangerous turn in the U.S. And we have what our, I think, founding fathers were most concerned about when they spoke about, you know, the biggest threats to the US not necessarily being from abroad but internal by a corrupted individual including a president.

Alex Lovit: We’ve just been talking about the risks to the US in potentially electing an authoritarian leader. And that’s largely a question about the institutions and systems that support democracy. But there’s also this idea of a democratic culture.

By definition, democracy requires mass participation and support. So sometimes when we see international examples of democracies failing, we say, well, they just didn’t have a culture of democracy. Is that a concept that makes sense to you? Is that something you’ve seen in your work? And what would it take for America to maintain and develop our own democratic culture?

Alexander Vindman: I think it makes some sense. But I think that the idea could be taken too far. Having had 250 years of a developing democracy is quite a buttress to continued democratic progress. Countries that are like Russia, for instance, that had a short experiment with democracy—many, many countries around the world without those strong institutions, without protection of individual rights and property rights that take a lot of time to institute and—don’t have that kind of backbone.

But I think—I don’t recall whose quote this is—so I can’t attribute it—but this famous quote about we’re one generation away from a dictatorship. That could very well be true. And we shouldn’t take that notion too far.

Yes. It gives us an edge, an advantage. But we also have, based on this 250 years of democratic history, a huge amount of complacency about our system. And that complacency has bred a lack of participation from the American public in our democracy where we have maybe 60 percent participate in our democracy on a somewhat frequent basis.

And that’s troubling. We have swaths of our country not participating because things are just fine. They’re living in the local communities where they don’t have to worry about individual freedoms and property rights. They didn’t historically. Now, they do.

But I think we have huge dangers around this. There’s also, I think, a lack of—and this is where government has failed, federal and state, in breeding a sense of community and an understanding of civics and individuals’ roles in democracy.

These are huge challenges because of our deep experience with democracy that we have not addressed. People don’t recognize the value of what they have. And I hope that, based on Project 2025, based on the risks to our national security and to individuals’ prosperity, people wake up to these risks and show up and vote, vote for continuing on our beautiful experiment with democracy.

Alex Lovit: This has been a sobering conversation for me and a very informative one about the risks to the United States internationally and in our own domestic politics. Alexander Vindman, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Alexander Vindman: Alex, thanks for having me. [music plays]

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a senior program officer and historian with the foundation. Isabel Pergande is our research assistant. George Drake, Jr. is our episode producer. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications.

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