Yeah.

Welcome to the Aaron Harber show.

This is part one of a specia three part series with Patriot.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the key witness in the Trump impeachment hearing.

Alex, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me on.

It's an honor.

I mean, I know you were, a National Security Council official.

You're retired, U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.

Of course.

And what impressed me, I looked at your list of medals, and it's very.

I mean, you know, the Meritorious Service Medal was a Purple Heart.

I mean, really, exceptional service for the country.

And I think literally millions of people appreciate it.

Most of all, I appreciated your candor.

Obviously, you became well known when you express your concern to superiors about a call that President Trump had and you testified in the impeachment hearings.

Again, to me, that took a lot of courage.

I'd like to start off with just kind of, you know, your tak on, you know, where we are today in Ukraine.

It's a big question.

And I think, you know a lot of folks think that it's, fallen off the plate.

It's not it's it's the war in its full scale.

Has was a geopolitical earthquake that really transformed, the, the landscape.

And we're seeing the aftershocks of that war today.

And it might not be at the, you know, on, headline news every single day.

But the the Ukrainians in particular have this amazing skill of drawing, you know, public attention around the world back to what they're doing to defend themselves with, with valor and grit, including thes these spectacular drone attacks blunting Russia's, major offensive on the ground.

The consequences of this war are being felt in the Middle East today.

You don't have a Syria under a different regime without Russia being bogged down, and with no capabilit to to support the Assad regime like they did in 2015 when they prompt above in the midst of, of, a revolution.

You don't have Iran with really, you know, pleading for support from their ally which they did, which they did.

And got nothing.

We got nothing without without Ukraine, you might not have had a a October 7th scenario in which, Russia was, you know, maybe behind the scenes encouraging adventures around the world to distract from, from the war between Russia and Ukraine, and then Ukraine or Israel responding to that by off the board, one, one piece after another, taking, taking their security threat without the Russia-Ukraine war.

So you're talking about Hezbollah, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria playing a role there?

Iran now, you know, maybe not preemptively, meaning that there was an acut threat of of Iran going nuclear, but certainly preventively based on the unique opportunities to be able to strike out and defeat, Iran in certain regards because it can respond with regards to all these investments it made in proxies that were supposed to inflict pain on the US and Israel.

So it's there, it's it's until it's resolved, it's going to be the most important, geopolitical event in the world, dragging down one of the mos nefarious regimes in the world until it's resolved.

Do you think President Trump will support Ukraine?

I think what I tried to do is I wrote a piec on Foreign Affairs in September looking at a higher source Trump situation, administration.

And you know, that theory that Paris may not fundamentally change, but there would be more muddling through.

But that alone, and the inability of the Russians to achieve their ends may start to get them to turn towards negotiation, finding a way out when the prospect of four more years of the US as the backbone to, bolstering Ukraine, the, the NATO response to to arm Ukraine, Trump completel changed that dynamic completely.

He he is he has a deep affinity.

You know, he's a big cheerleader for for Putin.

What is that about?

I think it's about the fact that he admires them.

He believes that they're friends.

It's this personal relationship.

It's also about the deep animus he has for, Vladimir Zelensky in Ukraine, in the role that they had in his first impeachment.

So I think what we have is a situation in which you have these directions that, you know, the president is really keen on taking, but the reality is that he's also extremely transactional.

He wants to be perceived as a as the victor.

He wants to be the he wants those PR wins.

And the biggest impedimen to achieving those are actually, Vladimir Putin, because the Ukrainians are willing to compromise, they're willing to come to the table, and it's Vladimir Putin that sees no interest in doing this, because Trump is, in a lot of ways, gifting him a lot of geopolitical wins and, driving these wedges between relationships.

And that means that for Putin, he wants to test that proposition.

So I think what might re-orient us is this recognition that that Putin is the impediment, that Putin is the one that's embarrassing him.

That's a tough lesson for for Trump to learn.

He learns lessons at the end of a really painful, circuitous road.

We hear some noises about, you know, potentially levying sanctions.

We might get there, but it's just going to be, you know, some more time befor he comes around to the reality.

I think one of the advantages for the potential for that to happen is Trump's personality, that, he has the ability he's he can be very facile.

He can he can do a 180 turn without any compunction.

And this certainl would be an opportunity for it.

Let me ask a few questions about both Biden and Trump.

You know, but before, the war started, when, Russia was about to invade, yo know, Biden's Biden's message, tough message to Putin was don't do that.

Which really was scary to me.

Yeah.

And then, of course, once Trump took office and, Russia, you know, launched a series of attacks against civilian, targets, Trump said something similar, like, you know, don't do that, Vladimir, or something to that effect.

What is wrong with these guys?

What what what makes him thin that saying something amorphous without any specific about regarding what will happen if you do this?

Why do they think suddenly Vladimir Putin's going to listen to us?

So I wrote a book on this.

Actually, the folly of realism is really a look at 35 years, six different administrations, Republican and Democrat, that bought into Russia's a professed exceptionalism.

The story to tell us about itself, that it should be treated unique has this massive territory, was an empire, has a conventional military and nuclear threat and all these things.

And we bought into that.

And on that premise we then proceeded to implement a policy based on misplaced hopes and fears, hopes that we could accomplish more with Russia.

This is the idea that, you know, we could work with them thinking a think about George, W Bush and, you know, him looking into Putin's soul and thinking tha they could work together on, on, rooting out terrorism around the world or climate change and all sorts of other kinds of fanciful ideas.

There were pockets of cooperation around arms contro because, you know, the Russians also wanted to limi how much they were spending on nuclear arms and 1500 nuclear active nuclear weapons.

1550 is plenty to achieve.

Your objectives in deterrence.

But by and large, we we had misplaced idea on what we could do with Russia, that we could draw them into the democratic world, even past the point wher maybe some of it was justified in the early 90s, these excessive hopes on, you know, democracy taking root by by the time you get Puti in power, you have a graduation from mischief making coercion to hybrid warfare, interference in elections t to outright military aggression.

So we should have not had that fanciful thinking.

And the other part of that was misplaced fears that, you know, we would be weak kneed when Russia would take an actio that was very contrary to U.S. national security.

And we would say, well, this might not be where we want to fight this fight.

And we don't wan the relationship to spiral down and end up in another Cold war.

And we sent the message that Russia could act with impunity, that it could take this graduated approach to causin really havoc around the world.

When, when do you know the objective should have been how do we warn them off?

How do we deter him?

How do we bolster the Ukrainians?

How do we bolster European security?

And eventually you know, that includes either containment, which is this old idea of where you, Russia's isolated or at least, you know, some sort of, There's a word I often use in this case, and it's, it's it's not just condemnation because that doesn't get you very far, but conditionality in the way we engage with Russia and we we keep making these same mistakes.

Again, you pointed out, you know, the Biden administration, you know, the Trump administration, Biden administration may have in certain regards, been taken a little bit more seriously because, you know, there was an expectation that he would say what he meant with the with Trump, it's empty words.

So I think it's even less meaningful than some of the, pronouncements we had previously.

Well, I mean, my my perspective on I think Biden's strategy was, just an utter failure.

I think instead of, helping Ukraine win the war at various points where that could have happened, we slow walked weaponry.

We didn't provide weaponry, certain weaponry when it was needed.

We basically our policy really was to, let Ukraine sacrifice its people, its troops, its resources to weaken Russia.

And that strategy was successful.

But to me, it's such an inhumane and inexcusable strategy.

It's pretty awful behind the scenes.

I was engaging with the Biden administration, you know, as regularly as I could, you know, they wanted to consult with, for starters, in the secretaries and even, you know, lieutenant colonel that were directors for European affairs had written the strategy for how do we contend with Russia for the for the national military strategy.

So I was uniquely positioned to kind of, you know, try to pitch in and add some, some counsel when you were o the National Security Council.

Well, even afterwards even when when it was the Biden administration, they were still looking for that kind of, interaction with formers.

Part of it was to keep people on sides, you know, so like this, they could message all the great things that they're doing.

And part of it was this idea of keeping, you know, messaging folks.

The other part was to truly solicit ideas.

And I was I was very aggressive in saying that this war was coming, maybe even out on a limb when we're talking about November of 20, 21, months before that, it was almost unavoidable.

But we should try to do what we can to avoid it because the consequences are so severe.

And then I wrote something in Foreign Affairs that really laid out the fact that there was no choice.

This is clearly going to be a full scale war.

This was not going to be limited operations.

And, you know, made the logical case why it would be a full scale war.

Well, to me, it' kind of obvious you don't amass a 170,000 troops just for fun.

Sure.

That's that's part of it.

There's also the urgency of getting, subduing, ultimately subduing Ukraine, which is central to Russia's identity, central to Russia's project to be a, you know, a Poland multipolar world.

So from from my standpoint, it was clear.

But I also suggested they levy sanctions early and often that they provide, they put European, U.S. troops and European eastern flank to send Russia the message that Russia was driving towards an outcome exactly opposite of what they wanted.

They they said they didn't want, you know, NATO moving in their direction, and then arming Ukraine to the teeth.

And I told them that they're going to do everything that they think is off the table.

They were going to ultimately do it.

And it will just be a day late and a dollar short.

You'd they would have missed the window.

And I found myself telling the and in these in these meetings with like lots of former policymakers, like I told you so now think about what needs to happen, you know, four year before six months down the road.

So it's not that, you know, I kind of understand a little bit they were concerned about this worst case scenario, nuclear Armageddon, that Russia was closer to, to this idea of using nuclear weapons against us.

That's completely misplaced.

The Russians are deathly afraid of tangling with the US.

I saw it firsthand in my own experiences, you know, sitting across the table from the Russians, they could be blowhards and full of bluste with a lot of other countries.

But with us, they they don't posture like that.

Or if they do, it's it's quite shallow.

And, you know, John Bolton and I sat in, in multiple meetings across the Russians from the national security apparatus.

So being driven by these, the worst case scenarios doesn't make a lot of sense because they're no lo to no probability of happening.

You do the things that you think will advance your interests, which would be making sure that the Russians don't thin that military aggression pays, or that the Chinese tak the same lesson that they don't, look at adventures in the Pacific against Taiwan and that you're sending the message that the democratic world will resolve to consolidate and punis aggressive aggression nations.

So we that we know that blood and treasur that was spent in World War Two to send that messag to kind of normalize this idea of no aggression against fellow states, that that stays in place.

And when the Bide administration was very, very, you know, they were too short sighted and understood, I think they missed the fac that the long term run vacations directed us to be much more involved.

One of the things that, has amazed me is how those in office think, placing sanction on Russia or other countries, on individuals, on organizations, are a big deal.

I mean, my my perspective is sanctions are pretty much meaningless.

They're they're an inconvenience, but they're not going to change policy.

Why why do, why do American, both civilian and military leaders, think so highly of sanctions when if they simply look at the result of the sanctions they have levied, there's been no change a significant change in policy.

So I think that there is a role for sanctions.

I mean, if you think about, we're talking about a whole different level of sanctions.

Think about, you know, what drove policy changes in, say, South Africa with regards to apartheid?

You know, it's the it was a kind of a universal rejectio of engagement with, South Africa or or something of that nature that did get them to, to move awa from both nuclear weapons and, you know, drop apartheid.

I think the way that we implement sanctions nowadays are half measures.

They do have a toll.

I think Russia's economy is increasingly brittle, but they're not a magic bullet.

They're not going to b something that flips a switch.

There were some things that we did that actually.

Did you know that the Russians were surprised inflicting pain, like when we froze, there were hundreds of billions of dollars in asset that they didn't have access to, that they though that they could use to cushion whatever sanctions would come that was meaningful.

But, the sanctions that we implemented, the energy sanctions, the sanctions on technology, those were were probably too limited in scope, and they were too, those those unfold over the course of months and years, not not days.

That's not how decisions are driven.

I don't think that we should discount the sanctions entirely as a tool.

It is the easy button.

A lot of time when you don't have the stomach to do to use hard power, it probably does have a role certainly in terms of signaling that there is resolve, especially if there were pretty severe sanctions, because they if you if you're willing to go there, then you know, that's the lead, the leading end, the tail.

It could be the use of force.

You know, I think our policy of doin things half baked in terms of, preventing Russia from selling or shipping oil, you know, we really haven't I mean we certainly depress the price a little bit, but they're selling, you know, million and millions of barrels of oil.

You know I think part of it is kind of, one we want to have our cake and eat it too, where, for example with as far as oil is concerned, we would like to stop them from, you know, sell oil.

But at the same time we're worried that if we do that or affect international markets and prices, gasoline prices rise here.

And that goes to another them that it seems like whether it be Biden, Trump, Obama, Clinton, anybody, none of them have the courag to say to the American people, here's something we need to do.

This is why we need to do it, and it's going to cost us.

We'r either going to have to borrow money or raise taxes, or you're going to have higher gasoline prices.

But here's the case for doing it.

And instead they would rather not, make that an informational, educational effort and try to keep everything, you know, hunky dory.

Is that just a lack of courage?

I'd say superficially, the American public doesn't have the stomach for hard, increased prices, but that's that.

Then the onus is on leadership.

And this is, I think, the to me, the hallmark of good leadership is that you don't just follow public opinion, you shape public opinion.

And therefore you might need to make the case on why this is important, why we need to, and that that is something that we need to do.

Sustained over a period of time.

Speaking in unison, I think maybe the Republicans do a better job of this with Donald Trump, you know, kind of repeatin the same, slogans over and over and, folks falling in line.

The Democrats probably do it worse, if anything, because there are so many different, views.

But it's critically important to it would have been critically important for, for President Biden if he was, you know, if he was a younger man, hadn't had a misstep to make that case consistently to the American public.

On why we need to take the actions we were wanting to do with regards to, supporting Ukraine and pushing back on Russia.

I don't think Biden's age was a factor.

I think it is 20 years younger.

It wouldn't matter.

I think the challenge, one of the challenges with President Biden is that he has he has been in this realm for 50 years, and he's actually extremel knowledgeable about the issues.

But bad judgment.

Well, that's a that's a separate that's a separate, issue.

But my point is tha I think with him and the people around them, the mistake they make is that they is because they know so much, they forget that everyone else doesn't know everything they know.

And when you hear, some of Biden's references to different policies, etc., he's talking in shorthand often, or he did.

And so, I think there's this whether it be insulation, isolation, whatever you want, or that you're in this bubble where everybody around you knows all the acronyms and knows all the policy, and it doesn't occur to you that, oh, there's 345 million Americans who really don't have the history and my interactions with, the administration and with the decision makers and Electeds is actually something different.

It was about, decision paralysis.

It wa about the fact that they were, there's a way in the military when you when you start to think through risks, you think through probabilities and consequences, you think through what is the what's the what is the worst thing that could happen in this case?

We're talking about, you know, nuclear war, which is obviously, Armageddon catastrophic.

But you also think through the probabilities.

And when you start to think through the probabilities, you start to recognize that, well, that's the worst case scenario.

But like almost no chance of this happening because it's mutually assured destruction.

So I think that they, they forgot about that part of the equation.

You talked about the the assigning of probability.

Yeah.

Assigning a probability to to to this and war that they were not very good at potentially parsing.

You know, they overinflated.

What the what I mean, there's, there's some reporting to indicate that somewhere along the way, after the because you have these key moments in the early part of the war, you have the Battle of Kiev you had the Battle of Kharkiv, Russians off balance, and supposedly, you know their, Intel assessment is that the possibility of the Russians thinking about using nuclear war jumps?

And then they do some effective things, like they start to rally, Russia's allies like the Chinese, to warn them off against, you know, this idea of using nuclear weapons.

The same thing with Indians.

And they send their own signals that this would this would probably make the U.S. more involved into the war.

But I think that was stil a fundamentally flawed problem.

Proposition that they were.

Yes, they were, you know, startin to talk about this idea of like, you know, how you might want to use nuclear weapons, but they, you know, the Russians are they think about nuclear war in a much, much more sophisticated manne than the US in their doctrine.

Their, military leadershi actually is invested in trains and thinks through these, these types of events much more so than the US side.

And that's a that's not particularly comforting idea.

So I don't think that the, really moved towards this, this idea of, engaging in nuclear war, whether it's against Ukraine or against the West.

So the Biden administratio made some general assumptions.

They were fundamentally flawed in moments where if they chose a different path, if they chose to, you know, open up the tap and let our military material flow to Ukraine, they could have had a much, much bigger effect.

Russia would not necessarily have landed on its fee and figured out that, you know, they could just keep pressing and squeezing and that's the path to victory.

So I think we los some major opportunities there.

We lost some major opportunities in 2023 when the Ukrainians were getting ready to launch their offensive.

As to how slowly we were providing it.

Ukrainians take a lot of responsibility for this, too, because they they ultimately attempted to execute this counteroffensive.

And it was it was it was a disaster.

I mean, they didn't follow some of our advice.

They decided to kind of, you want to in the military, you want to amass all your resources and, you know, 1 or 2 spots that they spread it.

Yeah.

Concentrated.

Instead, they spread spread their resources out.

And, but the US also underresourced the for that particular fight.

So, lots of lots of blame to go around, but it could have easily been a different scenario.

How does Putin get away with the extraordinary level of casualties?

Hundreds of thousands killed 2 or 3 times as many, injured, in his population.

You know, there's something to be said about Russia, as a, consistent kind of imperial power entitled to the lands around it and that this is potentially for the elites.

This is something worth fighting for.

He could justify some of this by the fact that he they're spending an enormous amount of money for this war.

So they're able to actually draft people, volunteers.

So it's not a draft about it, about get people to sign up as volunteers with transformative sums of money, like people could buy homes and cars and, you know, take care of a lot, of a lot of things that they need in, in destitut parts of portions of the country where they would normally never have access to that kind of resource.

So the Russians are spending, you know, some almost 40% of their federal budget on that somewhere in the 8 to 12% of, of their GDP, dependin on how you include the numbers, and so the people are signing up, they're still, you know, happy to join the they have been up until this point, they'r starting to be more challenges trying to get people to sign up based on the fact that we're talking about, you know, 900,000 casualties, combination of killed and wounded.

I think they're the state is a got an enormous repressive capability.

That means that they can hide some of these things, and that they could crush anybody that talks about the fac that this war is not a good idea and is a drain on the economy and drain on the manpower and disastrous for Russia.

So I think that's a, that's another tool.

And they they've literally jus scratched the surface on that.

Like this wa is still not deeply unpopular.

They don't have to entertain these repressive tools.

And Putin certainly remains very popular for us.

And this, power pulling for us politician, we're talking about high 50s, 60s.

You know, earlier on, the guy had, polling, you know, as high as it is the high 70s and 80s.

I mean, even if some of that slightly inflated, it's it's still, you know, we're talking about like Donald Trump that is underwater and he's got like 40% approval rating.

So, he is still quite popular.

He's seen as you know, somebody that could, defend the country against the biggest challengers in the world.

You know, they're they're punching up to the, there's sole superpower, by, not just fighting Ukraine.

They're the case that they're making is, yes, it's about Ukraine, but they're also fighting the entire Western world, including the US.

And that that, keeps, folks focuse and engaged on that war effort.

But can he go do this indefinitely, sustaining these casualties?

I think the answer is no.

Even if they're callous with their, the their troops and the number of lives lost, it's still a finite resource.

I mean, you're you're you're you're taking away in a lot of cases, the countries, producers, the folks that, drive the economy, you're taking away the, future generations.

Usually wars are fought by young folks.

And that can't go on forever.

Bigger maybe than the the the personnel issues actually are the material issues.

And that's where sanctions come in because it's harder for them to get access.

They have to do and runs around and, you know, do like black market type of, maneuvers to get access to some technologies.

And they can't produce enough.

The battlefield is so devastating that they can't produce enough armored vehicles, tanks, artillery to keep pace with the losses.

So that's why, in part, explains why they're having such a hard time on the battlefield, because none of the big stuff that the U.S. would use in, like these big, sweeping maneuver wars where you send like big armies, like to envelop like enemies, armies and things like that, those they can't they can't do tha because the Ukrainians are very, very quick to dispense them anytime they see, see these kind of things occurring.

They can't do basic things like, achieve air superiority, like the Israelis were able to do in Iran.

That gave them freedom of movement to, to just bomb all the critical infrastructure regime targets, nuclear, sites that, they were able to do and clear the path to the US to be able to go in and use these massive bombs to really root out, some of these really hardened sites.

What's 30,000 pound bombs on deeply buried targets?

All right.

We're going to talk about that in the next segment.

But Alex, I wanted to thank you.

Thank you for joining me.

All right.

That's all the time we have for part one of our special three part series with Colonel Vindman.

Make sure you watch all of our episodes.

This is Aaron Harbor.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.