The Free World vs. Him: Alexander Vindman on Trump's Foreign Policy
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United States of America. Good night and good luck. All right. I am delighted to be joined today by my friend Alex Vindman. You guys know Alex Vindman because he was one of the people inside the Trump administration who stood up and said, no, not going to be a part of your corrupt schemes and was treated very, very badly, as Trump would say, for his troubles.

Alex is an expert on national defense and international security. He is someone whose voice and whose knowledge I trust on these matters. And so I'm delighted to welcome to the show today because the world is a pretty hot place right now, Alex. And

I wanted to get your take on a fundamental question first about the foreign policy visions of the two candidates right now and how you see a Harris administration differing from a Trump administration. And also, interestingly, a Harris administration may be differing somewhat from the Biden administration. I'm just curious where you start off on that.

So, you know, I'm a national security guy. That sometimes seems like it's a distant foreign shores type of thing. It's not. National security starts at home. National security starts with American strength, American unity, cohesion, functioning institutions. And we have a test of national security here.

coming up in just 25 days. We will have two very, very different outcomes. In one outcome, you could argue that you might have an imperfect candidate. I would say that Kamala Harris is actually quite good, but some people might find her falling short in certain areas. But on the other side, you have a almost apocalyptic scenario. Sheer chaos,

Um, so steady hand stability in a chaotic world versus chaos and the likelihood of this is not a peacemaker. This is somebody that's going to drag the world into, into, uh, broader confrontations and, and, and conflict. So,

That's the easy way to describe it. Now, let's talk about what the dangers are in this world. There is a major war between Russia and Ukraine going on. That didn't disappear. It's two and a half years on that war. If Donald Trump is elected...

is going to get, it's not gonna wind down. He is not gonna wave a magic wand and that war is not gonna come to an end. The Ukrainians won't listen to him. He's Putin's puppet. So Putin has been manipulating him. Turns out they've had seven calls in which Donald Trump could have swayed Putin to either avoid the war in the first place or bring it to an end. He didn't do that. Putin instead used those signals to think, okay, well, I can work with this guy. Let me continue the war.

He is responsible for the direction the Republican Party takes. I don't have to worry about the Republicans being there. So that's the failure of Donald Trump to a certain extent with this narrative that he could bring peace. More dangerous is the fact that he will withdraw.

And that means that Russia is emboldened. Then you have the Middle East. Then you have the Pacific. That's one side of the equation. And then on the other side, you have Kamala Harris, who's been in leadership as a vice president for three and a half years, more than three and a half years, has met these leaders around the world, is well-respected, is tough, will stand her ground. She will not be trifled with. Whereas Putin has already manipulated Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a puppet, easily manipulated because he's got a big ego and a narcissist. Two very different views. One is danger. One is stability.

You know, one of the things that's been said a lot about Harris lately is that she's less ideological than she is pragmatic. I tend to agree with that assessment. When you look at her perspective on foreign policy right now, I don't know if you agree with me, but it does strike me that it has a more pragmatic, more realistic tone than a lot of maybe a lot of progressives might want.

So I think that's true to a certain extent. I think I would describe it maybe slightly different. She has a compass, a values compass that will keep her on track with regards to defending both American values and interests. They're actually aligned. These are not two divergent views in which one is kind of idealistic and the other one is pragmatic. It's not true.

Actually, one of the challenges we had is that we've been inconsistent with the way we've applied our values. Sometimes we've been right. You know, we were OK working with with dictators and other times when it didn't serve our interests. We were able to we were raging war like, you know, Bush did and brought us into at least one war of choice with regards to Iraq.

You don't have that with regards to Kamala Harris. You have a compass. You have like a true kind of north for the way she'll behave. But at the same time, based on experience, based on the desire to get things done and secure American interests, she's going to be thoughtful. She's already been proven to be...

Very, very well prepared. Just think about the way she debated and almost toyed with Donald Trump. So she will be prepared. She will take the counsel of her advisers.

And then she will exercise the good judgment that she's demonstrated and apply those to face down challenges and advance U.S. national security. Again, very stark contrast to Donald Trump, who is extremely transactional, inconsistent based on he measures everything on what's in it for him and likely to get us into more trouble.

You know, I want to address that point for a second because I think you touched on it. Donald Trump's fanboys, they tend to take this sort of what I call the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs line and they say, oh, no, it's either Trump or World War III. It's either Trump or war in Europe. And that's just it's just a lie. I mean, the likelihood of a conflict increases when weakness like Trump displays is shown.

That's absolutely true. Actually, it's my next book. It's coming out on the third anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war. I took a study of 30 years of relationships between Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine,

and the U.S. And mainly this was a lack of resolve in defending U.S. national security interests and pushing back on Russian aggression and supporting Ukraine. It's a microcosm of this idea that appeasement somehow works. It doesn't. It emboldened Putin. This is what Donald Trump has been doing. He's been emboldening Putin. He's been emboldening with his friendship with Kim Jong-un and

And she is building these dictators. That's not the way you prevent World War Three, because eventually when they take off the guys that easy targets our allies, when we're not there and they pick off the guys, guess what? Then we're left alone and then we're an easy target. That is a dangerous scenario. Yeah, I think I think that that is something that people.

And look, I think some people on the right just sort of do that reflexively. There's a neo-isolationism that's grown up on the right, and it's sort of reflexive. But it's also, I think, a...

It's also, I think, a... It is part of this modern idea that they don't have any enemies on their right and that a guy like Putin is ideologically more like them so they can't be opposed to him, whatever cruelty or whatever horrors he's imposing. And, you know...

One of the things you mentioned briefly was Ukraine, which is, of course, now, you know, I think I talked to you about six months into the Ukraine war when Russia had just started to really engage in some really horrific humanitarian violations by routinely targeting civilians. Where do you see the war standing right now? You know, it's ground to an ugly place, but where do you see it standing right now?

It is not a frozen conflict. The Ukrainians have kept it very, very dynamic. They keep going after strategic targets in Russia, imposing pain on Russia. They did this incursion and they're now occupying portions of Russian territory. They refuse to give up. And it's not like they're kind of being slowly ground down. They're trading meters, feet,

So thousands of Russian lives. So the Russians are being ground down. And what they need is they need a boost. They need a hand. So this is another thing. I just wrote an article for Foreign Affairs, a really lengthy one. So I don't know. People have the patience to read it. But I basically take a look at a scenario in which Donald Trump is irresponsible after January. And what he does is he withdraws and

And it encourages Russia to double down. But the Europeans are there. They know they're next. So they're going to double down. That's a recipe for for confrontation. Or we have the possibility of Kamala Harris taking what's been in certain regards, you know, frankly, an imperfect policy with regards to the Biden administration.

reviewing that, understanding where we fell short and giving the Ukrainians the boost to get them across to a place where they could actually compel Russia to negotiate next year. And I'd lay out a theory of victory on how you do that. You hold the Russians back now, you build over the course of the next nine months until next summer,

And then you strike next summer. And then it's a team effort. It's the Europeans that have spent twice as much as we have in supporting Ukraine over the course of this year. It's the U.S. We're the arsenal democracy. It's the Ukrainians stepping up and doing things, plugging holes that they didn't do. And there's a recipe where we actually end up at peace negotiations. It is not appeasement. That's a recipe for a longer war and for spillover.

And for emboldening not just the Russians, but the Iranians who have demonstrated by attacking Israel twice that they're emboldened based on, you know, frankly, a pattern that started all the way back with Donald Trump when the when.

When the Iranians struck a base and inflicted 100 casualties, traumatic brain injuries, and Donald Trump kind of just said, oh, nothing to see here. We didn't have a whole bunch of casualties. That kind of policy didn't work. I believe he referred to them as, quote, having bad headaches, which I thought was, you know, in the catalog of deeply insulting things Trump has said about our troops. That was right up there. That was that was a pretty...

pretty egregious one. That's pretty bad. Suckers and losers. Suckers and losers is the peak. Every time. Yeah. As it should. You mentioned Iran. Peak Trump. Peak Trump. Yes.

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You mentioned Iran and that is the, the conflict between Iran and Israel is an ongoing, uh, sore spot here, but really there, there's a relationship and I'm going to get to that in a moment, but there is this growing relationship between Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China, where North Korea is providing artillery, uh, shells and artillery pieces as well as ground troops. China is buying Russia's oil and gas outside of the sanctions. Uh,

Iran is providing these Shahid drones. That's the kind of challenge I think that a President Harris is going to have to face because each of those countries has incentives to stay in that relationship. Talk to me about where you see how we should be confronting that with a President Harris. We won't with Trump, obviously.

Yeah. It's the axis of autocrats versus the Democrats, small d Democrats. Right. It's the dictatorships that want, that see a moment, see an opportunity to surge ahead based on the fact that frankly, we were distracted. We were distracted with, with wars against non-state actors. We were just, we, we had a long piece dividend in which we, we under invested in, in national defense. We, we,

didn't really concern ourselves because we had this unipolar moment where we were the sole superpower with the fact that that may have been a temporary feature or that the combination of autocrats and dictatorships

together actually pose a potent challenge. And we have them coming together now to really, really press some advantages. This is not unconnected. The war between Russia and Ukraine is not unconnected to what's happening in the Middle East. Russia supports, encourages Iran, and Iran funds and arms the proxies to wage these wars against Israel, our dearest ally in the region.

Iran has now attacked twice directly Israel. And the Chinese are not just watching kind of in the wings. They're providing dual-use technologies to Russia. They're working together. And we cannot afford an administration, a Donald Trump administration, that decides that we can just go it alone, let our allies be picked off, and then we're this old...

We're the sole guy standing and then we're overwhelmed. That's that is a horrible scenario. If you have a Trump, um,

administration. I think he's conflicted at that point between Bibi, who he has a relationship with because of campaign matters and other stuff, as well as the conflict with Putin, where Putin doesn't want Iran and Iran's defense capabilities that are supplying it to be compromised. I think he's, I could just see like the worst, like furball of problems in that regard. Well, I would say, I only said it half-jokingly

that under Donald Trump, it wouldn't be when missiles are flying in and landing on Israelis, Israeli-Americans. You know, before we respond, the question would be, hey, Israel, what do I get in return? How much are you going to pay us? That is the transactionality. Yes, there is a current of some sort of affinity between Netanyahu and Trump, but there is a tension between

Between Donald Trump wanting to lash out at Iran, which frankly, Iran is terrified of that scenario. That's just fair. He's erratic and he's already attacked him.

The fact that he has a friendly relationship with Israel. But on the other side of the equation, the Russians are going to try to counsel Donald Trump to be cautious or to be restrained. What you can't have is just maximum chaos, maximum predictability.

Because I think I provided a reasonable basis on which to judge. But who knows what Donald Trump will do? He may very well choose a completely different calculation where he doesn't support Israel, even though that's in the U.S. national security interest. Because, you know, for some reason, Netanyahu pissed him off or the Russians talked him out of it. You know, this is the chaos that we cannot afford. In the course of a single conversation, Trump could 180 degree about face. He's done it before. I've seen him do it.

He will completely about face on on something because he's that kind of person. You know, so the complexities of that, of that, of Trump, you know, being so mercurial and so and so, you know, transactional. I think I mean, my theory of the case that we don't talk about enough.

He's still pissed off at Zelensky in Ukraine for not helping him, as you are well aware, gin up a fake dossier against Joe Biden and to validate this effort that he was engaged in with Giuliani and others to –

win the 2020 election. I think he's still, I think a lot of this, it's hard to imagine our foreign policy in Europe and Ukraine could be deeply affected by the fact that Donald Trump is pissed off because Zelensky wouldn't play a game in a scam that Trump wanted him to play.

He is extremely vindictive. And I think he, you know, he filled with grievance. And I think this is where I frankly am a little bit critical of Zelensky. There was no need for Zelensky to meet with Donald Trump. No, no. I didn't think so either. Yeah. Donald Trump is not the president of the United States. Donald Trump is a political candidate. Does he have a...

an obligation to his country to be with the president and the vice president yes but he doesn't have to both sides it and uh the fact is he was now zelinski was never going to ingratiate himself on the one hand you've got donald trump who's been cheerleading for putin for years has had seven phone calls with him and a single conversation between the link is the lindsay and trump is not going to do anything besides give a little bit of bona fides give a little bit of like you know uh um

support for Donald Trump. That was a mistake. But I think Ukraine should have no misconceptions about the disaster. Europe should have no misconceptions. They're actually doing contingency planning right now on the worst case scenario of a Trump election. You know, our allies are doing contingency planning about Donald Trump and our enemies are looking for the opportunities that they could exploit. What kind of president

is that i mean like a friend to our enemies and a threat to our allies that's that's the reality of the situation you know alex that's a really that's a really good way of putting it because because and i spoke to somebody the other day a european elected official the other day who said you know all we can do is hold tight and keep doing what we're doing because he will come

And you can imagine this is a person from the Baltics. He will come for us very quickly if we if once Trump lets Ukraine fall. And so all these all these countries are planning ahead and they are and NATO is NATO is hard at work trying to envision a world, a post-American world, essentially.

Yeah, it's true. But, you know, it's shocking that we have been for the better part of a century, the indispensable nation. Absolutely. This this election will be will determine not just the future of the United States, will determine for decades the future of the world and what kind of world we live in, whether it's a world filled with.

chaos and violence and war and the strong preying on the weak or whether we have the opportunity for frankly the kind of project that has been built since World War II where people have been dragged out of conflict and poverty and things of that nature. And it starts here at home. It starts with Americans making the decision that they want the better world that Kamala Harris will deliver

Or do they think that our best days are behind us like Donald Trump argues? And that's the difference. Right. Right. I mean, my my my perspective on a lot of that of Trump's pessimism about America and the world is is.

It has affected the confidence of our allies around the world, and it has encouraged... I don't just mean this as part of Trump talking about that America doesn't want to do NATO unless it becomes a protection racket. It's this pessimism about who we are as a people and about the future of our country. I feel like he is...

I feel like that that depresses people more entirely than people understand. It hurts people more completely than people understand. I think Americans are a patriotic lot. And, you know, there were there were moments I remember back in the Obama era where people didn't think that rather than Obama was sufficiently patriotic, that he was questioning, you know, the role of the U.S., that it was diminished or that the

The U.S. wasn't always the actor for good everywhere around the world. I think in some total we were, but sometimes we may have had missteps. But yet you have Donald Trump constantly, constantly bashing the United States, damning the United States, hating the American public. I don't understand how patriotic Americans can do that. And that's frankly one of the reasons I'm hopeful in this election that, you know,

You know, we're going to come out on the top. Democracy is going to come out on top. And then we can, you know, bury MAGA and Trump error. But I'm not the stupid political, you know, analyst that you are. So more important what you think, I guess.

So I want to talk, I want to turn for a second to what you're thinking about and working on in your life right now. You are a, you moved out of the DC matrix. Congratulations. So you've got a new book coming. What else are you working on right now? And then I want to talk briefly about your brother's campaign for Congress.

So I am doing a bunch of different stuff. I finished up my doctorate. That book, that dissertation is now my next book. It's about how we got into this war. I have a sub stack. It's got 50,000 followers at this point. Why it matters. You get a lot of my thinking there. I run a national security and defense think tank through the VET Voice Foundation and do political work through VoteVets to help get votes for veterans elected. And then I've got a non-profit foundation called

oriented on helping Ukraine called the Heroic Matters Foundation. Just a couple of things. You know, I just wish you I just wish you were taking it so easy. So so your brother, your brother, Eugene, is running for Congress in Virginia. How's that race going?

It's closer than it should be, at least by polling. It's hard to believe. His opponent is the fake family guy. Everybody knows who the fake family guy is. Everybody knows who the fake family guy is. The guy touted himself as a good old boy from Virginia. He's not. He's a D.C. attorney that represented Big Pharma. I'm not sure what he... He hasn't really... He didn't...

He served in the military. He was a special forces officer. But beyond that, beyond that relatively short stint, I frankly don't know what his bona fides are for public service. But he constantly lies about my twin brother. He talks about the fact that, you know, he denigrates my twin brother's service. My twin brother served for 25 years in uniform. And he was the chief ethics official in the White House. He basically slept there.

breathed and slept only public servants, public service. And it's really kind of a shame because this guy has quite a checkered history. She looked him up.

He was responsible for one of the worst, I think it was the worst fratricide incident in Afghanistan. He found culpable for it. And again, this guy, I think, seeked to question my twin brother's integrity and the fact that he served in combat, which he did. So anyway, it's ugly, kind of typical MAGA extremist, wants to take away women's reproductive rights.

Doesn't really have any ideas, but Donald's out there supporting him. He got some money from the moderate extremist wing. So anyway. Right. But Eugene's going to come out on top. Well, I think so, too. I mean, the way I've watched Eugene campaign, he's actually got... He's gotten good at it. He's gotten good at it, my friend. Yeah. So... Yeah. But... Well, folks...

I want to say this. Pay attention to Alex Veneman when you're looking for information on national security. He's online. Alex, tell us where you are on social media.

So I'm at Avinman at Twitter. Who knows how long I'm going to be there. Right. It's become poison. And then Substack is where I'm on pretty regularly. And then your networks, MSNBC, CNN, you know, right now. Okay. Well, Alex Finman, thank you again, my friend, for coming on. And we will talk to you again very soon. Excellent. Always a pleasure.

The Lincoln Project Podcast is a Lincoln Project production. Executive produced by Whitney Hayes, Finn Howe, and Joseph Warner-Chammy. Produced and edited by Whitney Hayes and Jeff Taylor. And good luck. Hey, everybody, if you'd like to get in touch, if you have suggestions for a guest or a show topic or just general questions, our email is podcast at LincolnProject. That's podcast at LincolnProject.us.