Yeah.

Welcome to the Aaron Harbor show.

My special guest is retire Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, former National Security Council official.

Alex, thanks for joining me again.

Thanks for having m on.

Hey, great to have you back.

You know, I, as I have said before, just impressed with your service.

Purple Heart recipient.

And that was an IED event, improvised explosive, an IED, actually.

It was one of those, fancy explosive projectiles.

So no love lost to the Iranians and the regime.

And where was that?

This was the big battl of Fallujah in November of 2004.

And my unit was, supporting tha by when I was briefly in Iraq, I was invited to a ceremony commemorating the laying of Fallujah.

And so I was really honored, by General Petraeus to, to be able to participate in that.

We've been talking about Ukraine.

One of the things that I'm just really interested in is how does Ukraine survive, given Russia's strategy, which is what we talked about for, is clearly Putin does not value life.

The fact that the front lines are a meat grinder, for Russian troops.

Hundreds of thousands literally hundreds of thousands killed already 2 or 3 times as many, injured.

A leader who tolerates that or not designs.

That is kind of stunning to me.

So Putin knows.

I mean, the calculation clearly is I mean, we've got wa more people, way more resources.

We're going to wear out Ukraine.

Well, I think fundamental to, to Putin's calculation is that he needs to break Western support there.

External support for Ukraine is absolutely essential.

It's a lifeline with regards to being able to defend its cities and critical infrastructure, intercepting Russian drones and, cruise missile attacks, ammunition coming through for these, you know, daily multiple battlefield artillery duels, all sorts of different kind of high end equipment that the Ukrainians didn't have in their inventory.

That's that's coming in from from the West.

I mean, what the Ukrainians contribute is a fierce fighting spirit, high level of of competence.

They're fighting for their homelands.

They're fighting for their families.

They understand what happens if the Russians actually succeed and win.

And you have, you know, you hav these atrocities like butcher.

You have the victimization of swaths of of Ukrainian population in the Russian occupied territories.

So they're fighting fiercely.

And then you have som pretty amazing ingenuity in and, development of new technology for the battlefield, like, especially drones, drone warfare.

You know, it's not the one trick pony that's going to solve everything, but it is a critical component of the battlefield.

Everything from strategic to tactical.

Strategic meaning goin after Russia's strategic assets like they do, whether it's i the energy sector, going after, fuel production, communications or Russia's war making capability, going after military, militar defense targets or the strategic bomber fleet that they they ha a significant impact on those, operationally going after where Russia puts its troops together on the battlefield at some points you have to you can't just be distributed everywhere.

Sometimes you have to consolidate, you know, places where the leadership is located, command and control, logistics that's operational.

And then tactically, whenever the Russians are able to attempt to mount, an attack, the Ukrainians see those things coming and just obliterate them on the battlefield.

So it's a critically important, component of this particular battlefiel that's constantly, innovating.

The Russians use ultrasonic warfare to disrupt the drones Ukrainians shift to, you know, fiber optics or, hardened some of these these different kinds of drones.

So it's how do they succeed?

How do they survive?

It's all these different components.

It's, you know, the.

External suppor that keeps Ukraine in the fight.

And frankly, I think gives Ukraine more staying power than the Russians.

Does this fundamentally change the equation that Russia's bigge and it has more resources?

No.

But Russia also bears an enormous amount of cost from this.

They think about everything that they lost with regards to the Middle East and their influence in the Middle East.

Gone.

You know, the Russians are irrelevant in the Middle East because they put all thei resources into Ukraine to them.

It's worth it because it's the most important component of their, you know, national identity an a source of their future power.

But it comes at a cost.

And that manpower, losses, those are that could be cavalier about individuals.

But in aggregate, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people that are needed to driv the economy that are needed to to be the the fathers and future generations.

That is not somethin that they could easily weather.

So I think that, we continu to support Ukraine if actually if we, juice, if we increas the support we give to Ukraine, it could accelerate the end of the war, which is something that Trump wants to do, but he's just going about it all wrong.

How do we convince President Trump to, to realize that the way you get peace in Ukraine, the way you convince Putin to come to the table to be reasonable, is really only by force.

It is, a very, very difficult task that the Ukrainians have in front of them that the Europeans have in front of them, that the, defense establishment and national security establishment in the US that knows better has in front of them.

And part of this is, making the case that the Ukrainians are willing to bend over backwards.

Is Ukraine willing to cede territory?

Do they want to do that?

No.

Will they be willing to accept some temporar loss of territory, meaning that Russia stays as an occupie without the Ukrainians accepting that, it's part of Russia, that it's part of Russia, but with but with the important caveat that they wouldn't necessarily fight for it.

This would just be tabled fo a conversation for a later day.

I think the Ukrainians are ready to do that, but the Russians are not.

The Russians have absolutely maximalist demands.

They wan they still want all Ukrainians.

They want regime change.

They don't want a democratically elected, government in Ukraine.

They want the West out.

So like this, the Ukrainia state is much more vulnerable.

They, they have shown really no flexibility from the, from the very beginning of the war.

I want to go to your point about, you know, what what we can do and in, in our first segment, first up, so one of the things I was talking about was, in my opinion, Bide and the Biden administration's absolute failure to educate the American people about the importance of supporting Ukraine.

And I think due to that failure, and I'm I'm not going to excuse the Biden administration, but I think that failure, it created a void.

We created an informational and educational void.

And what happened was a relatively small percentage, especially on the right.

And the Republican Party fill that void.

And they made the case that we should be in Ukraine, that we were wasting resources.

They would argue and, you know, because my my program is nonpartisan, I get as many emails from the right as I do from the left.

And their argument was I mean, if we can't build a wall on our southern border if we don't have the resources to fee kids here in the United States, why are we spending money on Ukraine?

And that administration totally failed to address those kinds of issues.

And what happened is that that anti Ukrainian voice grew.

It became a key part of the Republican Party.

And if you look at who Trump has appointed and put in key positions, i includes including, of course, the secretary of defense.

It includes a number of people who absolutely believe we should not be supporting Ukraine anymore.

You're stating facts, as I know them.

Also, I would say that the Biden administration did did some very, very critically important things.

When the war started, they rallied the democratic world.

They took a very, very, damaged relationship with our fellow democracies and NATO states and quickly rallied them around the fact that we needed to support Ukraine.

But the problem is that they then they didn't operationalize that.

A lot of it was just hand waves that we should be supporting Ukraine and ending Russia's, consistent pattern of aggressio when what they could have done is, yes, they could have had that, diplomatic engagement an then put some muscle behind it.

I see something maybe a little bit different with regards to the wa the American electorate sees it.

There have been some ebbs and flows in kind of, ratings, but a lot of them, if you scratch the surface, I think there's a consistency in the fact that the American public can see that there's an inherent merit just from a principled perspective, that Russia is a bully, a pressing a, you know, a country fighting for its freedom, independence that resonates with our own story.

So I think that's there.

But the voices that that seem to to capture, that make the most noise or the loud kind of MAGA isolationist like the Marjorie Taylor Greens or the you know, Secretary Johansson's.

Well, on top of that, too, I think another major Biden failure was the unwillingness to recognize the reality of the American people and our pattern of saying, yeah, we're willing to help.

We'r we're willing to get involved.

And after a few years, we get tired.

We get bored.

We get this interested in our support low.

So if you go into a theater, you have to go in knowing that, hey, you don't have a blank check, you don't have an unlimited number of years.

You need to get the frickin job done and get out.

They did not do that.

They did not did not design a public opinion strategy for that.

They did not design a military strategy for that.

So they went in with a pattern that was going to guarantee failure.

It's a certainly.

Disturbing from a strategists standpoint, because that's what my background is to see, that the US doesn't have the staying power fo things that are critical to U.S. national security, because you could have easily made the case, you know, the return on investment just put in those might be a little bit of a wonky economist turn, but what you get for what you put in, let's just put it that way.

Supporting Ukraine with with a modest amount of, weaponry for a modest cost and the return on and that weaponry is being manufactured and paid for in the United States, the resources are going back into U.S. defense sector for the things that we actually need to invest in anyway.

What what most people don't really understand is that the we gave Ukraine a lot of cases, kind of the old rusty stuff.

I wouldn't call it junk, but these are but they also wanted it because that was easier for them to operate initially so they could transition to the new.

It was.

But what we ended up doing is then there was the money that that we spent to went to buy the newest, shiniest, coolest stuff to rearm the military.

So it was not a giveaway.

It was.

We were basically rebuilding the military after 20 years of war.

We were supporting the Ukrainians and they were driving back the Russians and this, this, this threat.

Our budget is about 800 plus billion 830 billion.

You're talking about the defense budget, defense budget.

And for $100 billion, they basically took Russia off the board as a conventional threat for for some time.

So, what you get for what you put in makes a lot of sense in the Biden administration.

Could have could have made that case in a way that was grounded and would make sense to the American public.

Even then I think it would be a hard, hard sell, you know, 3 or 4 years into a war.

Although at the, the other side of the coin is we we somehow managed to find ourselves in 20 years of war where it wasn't at the forefront of mind for the American electorate.

But we were there, and we continue to pitch.

And so does it have to b the most important, agenda item, you know, but certainly the Biden administration could have done a hell of a lot better explaining why we were there, what we were getting for for our contributions.

Your references, the 20 year of war, obviously, Afghanistan and Afghanistan.

And look and look at how that ended, I mean, abysmal.

And on Biden's watch, and with a president who continues to pretend that our exit was flawless, which anybody watching in the footage knows was not the case or concerned about the quarter to half a million people left behin who helped us, their families, who helped us, who remained vulnerable.

Which to me was just a disgusting abandonment of peopl who risked their lives for us.

I think that's true to a certain extent.

I think having served in the Middle East for some of these wars, you know, there's, some moral clarity around war of necessity and wars of choice.

I think the Iraq War was was a war of of choice, based on the premise of, yo know, rooting out Iran's, Iraq's a nuclear arsenal that didn't exist, for Afghanistan.

We were seeking retribution for the 9/11 attacks.

But did we have to be there for 20 years?

A nation building?

It's hard to argu with a fundamental premise that for tens of millions of people, for those 20 years, we made life easier.

Women had access to education.

They had access to basic services.

So from a human level, there was there was some utility.

There.

To me, it's hard to the part that's, that challenges me in thinking about, you know, that war, it was mismanaged for for a lon swaths of time with, you know, constant pronouncements by the military brass that victory was around the corner.

There would be stable.

And President Biden' with withdrawal, was following through on President Trump's agreement that, the U.S wasn't going to stay there, indefinitely with military military force.

So I guess the question is, can we had can we have stayed on there and bolstered, propped up, a corrupt Afghan government and, you know, kept things bottled up for some time possibly.

Would we have successfully would we have to be there, you know, for not just years, but for decades to do some nation building like we've done in long term investments in other corners of the world where we fought and helped rebuild countries, potentially we just again, we didn't make the case for for that, we made the case that, you know, we we can withdraw any time now because the Afghans could take care on their own.

Their own.

The Afghans had, you know, several hundred thousand members of the Army.

We've been training them for years.

You know, some assumption, not not every assumption, different intelligence.

Field.

I mean, you know, the assumption was, well, maybe they can, handle things on their own, but there was a lo of intelligence that said, no, they can't, things will collapse.

And also in terms of our presence, you know, one of the questions is, first of all, if you look at the investment of 20 that 20 years we didn't lose, although every, member of our troops, live life that were lost is important.

We didn't lose huge numbers.

How many?

2 or 3000 casualties were around what, under 10,000?

And so, you know, you could argue it wasn't a huge cost, but it was financially.

I mean, we spent, what, a couple of trillion dollars, there.

And and when you look at, okay, what would have maintaine the status quo so women, kids, girls could go to school and all that.

I mean you were looking at a fortune.

Yeah.

2500 people.

So, no, that decision was awful.

And, I think you can blame President Trump, version one for negotiating.

Despite his belief that he's a great dealmaker.

A horrendous deal, which where where he, he committed to withdrawing all U.S. forces, literally, what, 90 days or so or 100 days after, Biden took office.

I mean, that made no sense at all.

But that was in May.

Well, Biden didn' do the withdrawal until August.

So, I mean, he already blew past the Trump deadline.

So I don't blame Trump for what Biden did.

I blame Trump for what Trump did.

Right.

And I blame Biden for it.

I mean, he could have easily taken another few months.

He could have been bringin people out, you know, 1 or 2000 a day, starting when he took office.

And with very few people would say that that that was executed i anything resembling effective.

I mean, that was a terrible loss of life.

Both, at the withdrawal and the consequences of that for the Afghan population.

And I think and continues to be.

Yeah, daily.

And now, unfortunately, being kind of relived and amplified because of Trump's, desire, you know, willingness to expel these folks that that spilled blood in support of U.S wars.

My book is about this idea that we make certain mistakes over and over.

Some of that is a lack of competence, a lack of knowledge o the region being poor students.

The political decision makers are not necessarily you know they're they're they're elected and they call the shots, but they're maybe not the best prepared to manage some of these challenges.

So Afghanistan is just another case study.

Similar to my Russia Ukraine war.

But there are a lot of different places and there are different approaches you can take.

I mean, the fundamentally, the argument I make in my book is about this idea of new idealism.

What is it that's important to us?

It's American values.

It's the fact that we we nurture, you know, individual liberties, capitalist societies protection of individual rights.

And then, you know, s that's on the individual level.

And then we we support state that believe in the same things.

So we should be investing in states that espouse and share our views.

We should be in certain regards.

There's a case to be made using my new idea, a new idealism school of thought that maybe Afghanistan, maybe there was a, you know, justification for us to be ther longer because we're nurturing a struggling, emerging democracy way, way early on.

And then, of course, we wanted to support democratic institutions because that's the sourc of our strength of prosperity.

And we want to build relationships with folks that share our views.

So I think, you know, to me, it's pretty clear that we have a repeated pattern of transgressions.

And there's a different approach to to secure ourselves over the long term.

And in terms of nation building, I think another area I mean, we could discuss at some point is just, maybe our failur to recognize different cultures and different societies and where we think nation building is going to succeed.

It may not really have a chance.

Or we think, I mean, we think democracy is great and is wonderful, which, in our assumption, which I think can often be wrong, is that everybody else wants that too.

And to go into a society with that intention, we may not realize that, hey, the people here aren't that crazy about them.

Out here, a third of the population here might not believe it.

Well, that's that's that's getting worse.

Well first of all, I give you know, I give President Trump credi for his push to get Europe, get the NATO allies to move thei spending up from two, 3% to 5%.

Some of them are, you know, actually well below 2%.

But a lot of them have already made great progress.

I think someone need to whisper in his ear and say, hey, let's let's set a target a 7.5%.

Let's let's, I mean, it's their future.

I think that's not a realistic number.

When you have to think about the other obligations, you have to me as a, as a, a democratic societ to provide services and things of that nature education, social safety nets.

I think the.

Well, they've brought in the definition of the what the percent.

Sure.

A 5% includes like infrastructure investments and stuff like that.

What really just a quick history lesson after 2014, that was the whale summit in which there was an agreement, you know, to increase spending to 2% of GDP and some progress was not not nearly enough.

We're talking about, you know, a handful of states decided to do that, mainly driven by the fac that the states that were closer to the to the fight, that understood that Russia was an aggressor were starting to spend more Trump, Trump's, you know, much more transactional approach.

He's actually had been he's been very consistent on about the fact that NATO hasn't been paying its way.

We're not talking about like something that emerged in 2016 when he was president.

He was talking about in the 1990s that, you know, that there are free riders and free loader and stuff like that.

So he he latched onto this idea and really tried to compel states to join.

And he managed to graduate to, I think, nine, Biden was much, much more successful, but it was mainly because of the wa in Ukraine going to full scale.

And at that point, you could stick your head in the sand like an ostrich, but you're still hearing the, you know, the explosions and all the and all the, the consequence of this war.

So a lot more states joine and now there's a clear clarity around the fact that it's it's about Russia, and Ukraine.

It's its own backyard.

What does the European nations really have and what is their potential to help Ukraine versus, the potential of the United States?

I mean, we're a country that that manufactures weapons on a scale no other country and ammunition, etc.. What what can Europe do and how long will it take, for them to really be able to play a much.

But, that's because we are the Arsenal democracy.

We have bee the biggest producer of weapons.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

We've been taught to defend ourselves and defend our beliefs and defend our allies.

And, the Europeans have been free riders.

They've been not paying their fair share even though the telltale signs of Russian aggression have been growing.

We're not talking about 2022.

We're talking about 2014 or 20 or 2008 where the Russians went to wa against Georgia, or before that, when the Russians were involved in, like, different cyber skirmishes and things of that nature.

So the signs were there.

The Europeans were under investing and now they can't they can't do that anymore.

Partially, mainly probabl to their own threat perceptions, partiall because they're being compelled to do so in order to keep, the U.S engaged and keep the U.S. in the NATO alliance.

So now they're pledging 5%, which is huge.

But us, by the way, i spending around 3% of our GDP.

So, I mean, that ends up being a lot more because we're a massive economy.

We'r almost a $30 trillion economy.

So for us that that means w spend about 900 billion a year.

The Europeans are about a 20, trillion euro economy.

And if they're spending 5% of GDP, that's them.

Then they're starting to spend as much money as we are.

But then they have to start buildin the infrastructure and invest.

I think in the short term that means that they buy things from us and kick it over to the Ukrainians.

But eventually I think that's going to be an investment in their own, because we've also proven ourselves to be maybe not the most reliable.

So I think we could see a situation in which they start to develop their own manufacturing capacity, and they are doing that.

Is there a separate effort to where the the allies have gotten together and say, hey, we need a specific plan to provide Ukraine with 100,000 drone a month or something like that.

Is anybody doing that specific?

Sure.

There have been a number of different efforts, you know, kind of, in certain cases bilaterally with with countries delivering based on what they produce.

You know, for instance, Swede was like a microcosm of its own, hermetically seale and defense industrial complex because they weren't part of an airline.

So they could go, and bolster the Ukrainian economy.

I think France is playing a significant role.

The UK is playing a significant role.

Germany is also starting to play.

They're gearing up, they're gearing up.

But they also there's som partnerships that are forming.

I think these things are just going to take some time.

Can Ukraine afford that time?

I think the answer is yes.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

You have way better intelligence that I do, but my impression is that Russia is making gains in Ukraine very slowly, you know, and a great cost.

But nevertheless they are picking up territory and they're picking up assets.

They are, when you think about Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, and that they're, you know, taking a kilometers in a country that stretches many hundreds of kilometers, that's not really a path to victory anytime soon.

So I think the idea is that, you know, and the Ukrainians recogniz this, is that they have minimum, need to be effectiv in blunting the Russian attacks, imposing maximum costs.

And then the Russian just start to run out of steam and they have to mak some alternative calculations.

I think what ends up happening because the US, because of this gap, that the Europeans are not ready to step in, step in, in terms of on the ground or step in, in terms of arming the Ukrainians that the US is withdrawing.

It does make things obviously more challenging for the Ukrainians.

I mean, their cities ar susceptible to more air attacks.

They could start having a situation in which the Russians start to outmatch the in a much more significant way with regards to artillery ammunition.

These cannon, ammunition and things of that nature unfolds over the course of months.

And in those intervening months, the Ukrainians are buying from the U.S, the Europeans are buying from us, and the Europeans are starting to manufacture on their own.

And that keeps Ukraine in the fight.

You could almost think about like how finely tuned this is and where things start to kind of start to get harder and unravel.

And what parts of Europe start to step in, or the U.S. could, the Europeans and the Ukrainians can buy.

And whether the Russians still have the steam to be able to stay in the fight.

So it's closer, clearly, that the Ukrainian are going to be completely okay.

But I'd say that the different components add up to Ukraine having mor staying power than the Russians, and that this is going to play out over the course of another yea because of politics and because Trump is, you know, doin a lot of cheerleading for Russia that is going to play out for another year.

And then, you know, sometime in 2026, we might have the Russians recognizing that, you know, even with a friendlier us, that they're now still not making gains.

The costs are too high.

And start to look at, you know, maybe some more if you're Zelensky.

What's the endgame right now?

Is that it, what you described.

But what's the end game I think I think that's that's probably what he's thinking to a certain extent.

You know, the worst case or worst case scenario would be a war that goes on two years or three years in whic the fundamentals don't change.

You know, there's a lot of kind of, dueling improvements and innovation with regard to, drone warfare.

The Russians at some poin need to make some calculations on whether they need to do mass mobilization.

The Ukrainians might need to do their own mass mobilization to reduce the the draft age from what it's currently 2 to 25 year olds to 18 year olds.

These things could unfold over the course of multiple years.

But, you know, this war has been extremely costly for Russia.

They put ten years into Afghanistan, suffered a fraction of the of the losses.

We're talking about 15,000, losses there ultimately gave up their three plus years, thre and a half years into this war.

Do they have the staying power to stick around for four and a half years or five and a half years when the consequences and the cost are so much greater?

I just because they're bigger, does it mean that they could weather these these challenges indefinitely?

Well, I you know, I think you'r thinking, rationally, logically, but in this cas and a difference between Russia and Afghanistan and Russia and Ukraine, I think the difference is Putin.

I spent quite, quite a bit of time talking about in the book, talking about why Russia is so invested in Ukraine, and it has to do with a thousand year kind of shared history of neighbors being in the same neighborhood, being neighbors, and a struggle for independenc and a struggle for domination.

And, you know, as an empire for Russia and how critical, Ukraine was to Russian power and that they can't see themselves as grea if if Ukraine is not part of it.

So I'm not I' not dismissing these features.

I just understand the cost of this, this war.

So it's not necessarily that I'm wishful thinking being particularly wishful about, you know, negotiations are unfolding in 2026.

I just understand that it's going to be very difficult and complex and, with no prospects for Russia, there's an opportunity and the U.S. can play a constructive role in creating that opportunit and driving compelling Russia.

Or, we could do something that Trump has declared that he doesn't want, which is a you know, indefinite war there.

I'm doing what I did as a as a strategist, like laying out different courses of action and how we might be able to get to, to more favorable outcomes.

All right, Alex, thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Thanks.

That was retire Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, former National Security Council official, a Purple Heart recipient and an author.

So make sure you d read his book, I'm Aaron Harbor.

Make sure you watch the other episodes in this multi-part series.

Thanks for watching.