Values, Realism, and U.S. Foreign Policy, con Alexander Vindman

KEVIN MALONEY: For this episode of Values & Interests, I am joined by Alexander Vindman, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and famously the former director for European affairs on the White House’s National Security Council in the first Trump Administration. Alex and I delve into how the United States might pursue a realist foreign policy without abandoning its core values. We unpack the complicated but critical interplay between morality and power in the practice of geopolitics, we explore the Trump administration’s increasingly transactional approach to foreign policy, and close with a discussion on what a just end to the war in Ukraine might look like. Alexander’s latest book is The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself about Russia and Betrayed Ukraine.

As always, be sure to subscribe to Carnegie Council on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and I hope you enjoy today’s episode.

Alex Vindman, thank you so much for joining us at Carnegie Council today on the Values & Interests podcast. There is obviously a lot going on in the world geopolitically right now. There are many questions in relation to both values and morals related to foreign policy and also these more realist arguments that are floating out there right now in terms of “America First” and “Western First” and what that means. I am happy you are here today as a practitioner and somebody who has thought deeply about these values and interests questions in the practice of U.S. foreign policy. Thank you so much for joining us today.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: Thanks for having me on. I am looking forward to the conversation.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to start by having the audience learn a bit about your own value system and background. We feel very strongly at the Council that a lot of times foreign policy, governments, and institutions are thought of as these monolithic things, but they’re not; they are made up of people who have their own personal value systems, which then inform the principles and which then inform the actual policies in the world or military action in the world. I want to start by hearing from you about your own value system, and then we can go from there.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: I wrote a book about this. My first book was a memoir, Here, Right Matters: An American Story, and I attempted to diagnose what drove me from a values perspective, and I played with this idea of the genetic memory of my family overcoming the challenges of the 20th century. Both of my grandfathers were killed in World War II, fighting the Nazis in the Red Army, and then my dad and his mother and sister fled to the Ural Mountains and survived the war, the Jewish massacres, and things of that nature. My dad showed resilience in starting over many times. I think part of my value set is the agility, flexibility, and resilience to be able to start over and keep starting over, which is a line I repeated in my first book. I think resilience is a cornerstone.

Resilience, much like realism and values, have an interplay, a resilience that is not willing to sacrifice ethics and values, so a principled resilience. We are going to come up with that term, “principled resilience,” so adjusting and adapting but without devolving to nastiness.

I think that the immigrant experience of growing up in the United States built on some of those genetic or hereditary traits, both successes and failures along the way and learning from mistakes, which I think I am pretty frank in talking about the fact that I screwed up as a young guy. I got kicked out of my first university and then overcorrected and got a couple of Master’s degrees and a Doctorate, so a hard work ethic is important.

I think the military was critically important for instilling some discipline, not through force but through responsibility. Just like folks learn when they are most interested and enthusiastic and their passions are activated I think the military did a lot of that for me. The military value set is something I talk about in almost every conversation I have with young folks.

For the Army we stress the values of leadership, loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage, and I talk about the fact that when I am facing challenges I devolve down to basic decisions on what is right and what is wrong and how that aligns with those values.

Now, being a public figure, I feel an even greater duty to make sure I adhere to those value sets because for at least some corners of the public I am put up on a pedestal as a moral actor. We need good models. I am not saying that I walk on water or anything, but I definitely attempt to model good behavior for young folks who are seeing too much bad behavior from leadership. Those are the things that generally drive me.

Then I think about the way I conduct myself as a foreign policy or national security actor: How do these things actually align? Do they work? In many cases they do. That is a snapshot.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to push on this alignment between values and interests. I spoke a few weeks back on the podcast with Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, and we talked a lot about this inculcation of values. He mentioned a tension that he found in the mid-2000s in trying to think about how to reinvent the values training within the U.S. Army and not make it this thing that people have to do but a thing that is valuable from a realist perspective: It is our job to go out there and conduct a mission; how do values help us to do that and not feel like it is this moral albatross around the neck?

Could you talk about your experience in the alignment, or in some situations I am sure there is tension between values and interests, but how do you think about that personally?

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: I guess there is tension. When push comes to shove I probably side with values over interests. Certainly that is the foreign policy school thought I advocate for, the centrality or primacy of values. Not that you discard interests; that would be foolhardy. There is an interplay and a recognition that maybe sometimes even the greater good might necessitate a hew toward interests but with the recognition that you are undermining values. That is all conceptual.

From a practical standpoint I would say that in the course of my career I have been pushed and trained to do certain things, like don’t walk by a mistake, something that General Hertling would fully understand and embrace and has attempted to advocate for. You can do that up and down the leadership hierarchy interestingly enough.

In most cases, especially with good-quality leaders, you deliver that correction with respect and earnestness. Then of course there are times where that does not go so well. At the first Trump impeachment my efforts were behind the scenes to counsel the president that he was making a mistake and that he should correct course both for his own personal interests as well as for the nation’s interests, and that was disregarded and resulted in an abuse of power and an impeachment.

The other aspect of that that has been important to me is that I have been encouraged to voice my opinion. Certainly the more senior I became the more I was encouraged to voice my opinion. In certain regards I had a wonderful career with lots of unique, singular experiences amounting to a singular perspective on issues, and I found that I sometimes would be looked at in far more senior venues for an authoritative opinion or recommendation on a course of action. I have been encouraged to be diplomatic, thoughtful, and respectful, but to deliver my counsel regardless of whether it was aligned or at odds with the conventional thinking in the room.

I don’t know if that quite gets to your tension between values and interests. I don’t know if they are that misaligned or if the tension is that great. I think it is the perception that that tension is great. My perception is that our interests align with our values and are in harmony most of the time, but we are in a realist world in which potentially you have folks who do not necessarily think values are relevant and act on short-term, transactional interests. That is potentially a tension, the time horizon, the short-term transactional nature is what creates the tension, and in those kinds of situations you might have to be adroit in navigating some of those things, but I have always focused on long-term interests.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think one of the things that is concerning to us at the Council right now is that from a high-level values perspective it seemed post-World War II that practitioners were given this values and interests equation. You cannot just throw one out for the other. It seems now that under the guise of this stripped-down version of transactional realism that values are either being de-prioritized or thought of as something a “sucker” would use instead of negotiating a good deal. There is this transition to transactional, amoral foreign policy which feels very tactical.

You talk about this a lot in the book in terms of the short-term tactical considerations within Ukraine, going all the way back to Crimea, and what that has cost us in the long term because maybe values did not influence our “realist” approach as much as it should have, in your opinion.

Maybe it would be good to pivot to Ukraine and the wider geopolitical conversation around this values and interests equation right now. Hopefully I laid out your thesis partially well; I am happy to be corrected if not.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: The book was written as a case study on how realism—certainly in its most transactional form and not like the high craft that might be associated with Kissinger or someone like that, because he is an exception—or what I refer to as “faux realism” has been transactional, short-sighted, and catering to hopes and fears. I wanted to address this idea that somehow folks who think through and serve values are the suckers.

I think actually it is the exact opposite. With mistakes along the way, if we managed to stick to a world order and principles during a much more dangerous period, for most of our post-World War II history including the Cold War with the threat of nuclear armageddon, and we navigated it with this high-minded world order, sometimes suppressing maximum benefit for the greater good, we had an easier go of it. Transnational terror did not pose an existential threat.

I don’t even understand the mentality that says that now in this time when we are still a singular power that we need to devolve and shift away from the values that have allowed us to be successful to a much more transactional, interest-based approach. That doesn’t make sense. If anything, that is the mythology of dealmaking realism that has taken us to this direction that, yes, maybe we left something on the table but only in terms of what is immediately in front of us, but in the long term—to continue that metaphor of card games—the United States was the “house,” the United States benefited from stability, the United States benefited from the reserve currency being the dollar, all of these things, so we got the lion’s share of the prosperity because of the short-term suppression of maximalist interests in the beginning. This idea does not make sense to me.

When we take a look at where we started this question, with the case study that is my book and how things went wrong with regard to Ukraine, I think you can make an almost exhaustive case looking at about six different moments all up through that Russia-U.S.-Ukraine relationship. These were critical junctures in the relationship where we catered to misplaced hopes and fears and to interests rather than sufficiently to our values.

From my standpoint we are continuing the mistakes of the past, just like I articulate in the book, and Trump is the amplified version of the mistakes of the last several decades of making transactional decisions catering to interests and hopes and fears instead of pivoting back to what makes us strong and a principled approach to the way we conduct ourselves around the world.

KEVIN MALONEY: In terms of the environment right now, because as we have talked about there does not seem to be an appetite from a large portion of the U.S. population for a more values-based grand strategy. I am painting with a broad brush here, but there seems to be a shift in terms of the appetite of the American people to an extent. It is certainly different than 1998 right now.

In terms of looking at the failure to sell that vision, a liberal values-based international vision, to the American people, one of the things I focus on here at the Council is narratives within U.S. foreign policy, and we have been looking closely at this defunding/collapse of the U.S. soft power apparatus over the last few months and have had very blunt conversations with people who work in that space, where they assumed the virtue of what they were doing and thought that message was permeating to the American people, so we need to actually need message outward and make the case outward, but now they are in a situation where the institutions that they worked for are gone, and that has to do a lot with the failure to make the case effectively to domestic America.

Do you have thoughts on that parallel to U.S. foreign policy or disagreements with that parallel? It is something I am very interested in right now.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: It is interesting. I would say, just like I criticize faux realism I also criticize faux idealism. This is an imperfect label for this idea of neo-idealism, fundamentally a view that values are central to our interests and that we should act from a position of values primacy. The reason is that the realists and neocons got us into a couple of decades of war, and the idealists did not navigate our challenges all that much better. There was a lot of high-minded rhetoric, but in terms of practice not much was delivered.

There were some pretty important things. I would say from a domestic standpoint the fact that President Obama delivered the Affordable Care Act and a folks rely on it, and now it is a wildly popular program. I think that is an example of delivering on those values, but those were few and far between, and I think we missed some opportunities along the way to make the case as to why idealism should be the way we govern ourselves.

I also struggle with this idea of whether Donald Trump is a product of the environment or is he one of those historical figures, of which there are plenty, that have enormous agency and also define and drive the environment. I think it is a combination of both, a combination of the fact that lots of folks were left behind because idealism delivered some but insufficiently to the population, too many people were left behind, and a lot of folks were acting out of grievance, then the enormous agency he has almost as a cult-like figure and devised this acute turn to transactional dealmaking that has not served us all that well in the past. We are going to see it live here over the course of the next several years how tariffs are going to play out on our economy and a bunch of other factors, cuts in social safety nets, and a president who is happy and eager to engage in loose talk around nuclear weapons.

I am used to presidents who, when they say something it actually means something, not one where it is like a bunch of hot air. We are going to see the results of this kind of dealmaking and ultimate realism, and I don’t think it is going to serve us very well.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think one of the challenges of being in the think tank world or the academic world is breaking free of old frameworks of thinking when you are analyzing policy. Again, from the narrative perspective, if you go back and look, there used to be not an inch of space between when a president stepped to the podium and their policy. Now there could not be a larger gulf between those two things.

There are different dynamics in terms of who is “washing the message” for different audiences to be more digestible, but it is a very challenging moment in terms of what do the people in power actually mean. This goes back to what you talked about before, the importance of moral leadership.

One of things we have been looking at at the Council from an ethics perspective in terms of what we do is, you talked at about whether Trump is a symptom or is he something that is driving the institutional change. I am not speaking for the Council, but my own opinion is that to a point there was a permission structure that allowed it to happen, and then you get the system becoming what he now wants it to be. There were many times when moral leadership could have stepped up as a red line, but that never happened, and then institutionally and normatively you start to see this death by a thousand cuts. That is my high level from an applied ethics perspective, but obviously there is much more work to do to analyze that.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: I am thinking back to an earlier point you made about the tension between interests and values and General Hertling’s commentary. This issue hits particularly close to home for me. I am in a different chapter of my life out of the military. I think the military as a whole made a calculation about the greater good in part to preserve the institution, and in part probably individuals for their own personal benefit decided that this was not a fight they wanted to get into and needed to be there, to be in the breach for more dangerous moments. Instead they presented themselves as potential vulnerable prey to predators like Donald Trump and invited that kind of behavior.

For me I have tried to be consistent in holding to principles and values even if we are in an environment in which the chief executive has no floor to his behavior, models abhorrent behavior, and frankly in a lot of ways is about one of the weakest men we have had in public leadership. He is very thin-skinned and not modeling let’s say the “Marlboro Man” that is supposed to be the iconic American male archetype or something of that nature. I think we are in a moment in which it is acceptable to some to say, “Well, that’s just politics, that’s what we should expect.”

I am in a completely different sphere. I think we should hold our elected officials to a higher standard and not a lower standard, and I am not willing to compromise in that regard. Maybe American society might come around to this idea because of the costs that we are going to see unfold during this administration. We are early days, but we are seeing some of these indicators already with regard to a weakness in the economy. That is just going to amplify.

KEVIN MALONEY: It has been interesting again in terms of the conflation of concepts at least in the first few months. You see this group of writers and practitioners in government saying America First and transactional foreign policy is pure realism manifest. At the Council we have always been very wary of that. If I was going to distill that into one thing we do, it is making sure that people within foreign policy are asking the question, “Power, but to what end?” That goes back to Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr and the concept of Christian realism.

There is a great academic article from the 1950s which is a collection of letters back and forth between Morgenthau and Niebuhr debating this values and interests equation now that the United States has assumed the supreme mantle of the international system. What Niebuhr talks about is this fact that you can walk and chew gum at the same time. States must be cognizant of this pure evil that might be out there in the world, but we have to weigh moral values alongside national interests to avoid the other end of the spectrum, which is basically liberal idealist overreach, and we have seen the consequences of both of those in the past 80 years. The Morgenthau-Niebuhr back-and-forth in this particular article has been quite formative for me at the Council. I just wanted to mention that.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: That is interesting. It has been a few years. There was an assistant secretary, Wess Mitchell, who was quite capable but on the center-right, I would say. I remember having an interesting conversation with him, and the fundamental takeaway was that you cannot have a functional foreign policy if you sacrifice your values to interests and you cannot have a functional foreign policy if you sacrifice your interests to values. There is a balance between the two.

In my balance the scales tip toward values as a pragmatic and practical approach. This is not an idealistic or ideological picture. It is a practical approach because we know that the way we practice realism does not really work. It is short-term; it is transactional. If we lean toward values primacy, then that focuses us on the long-term and not what is immediately in front of us, and that is what could keep us navigating.

The Three-Body Problem is a science fiction series. In the third book in the last section there is this "dark forest." It is an interesting realist view of the universe. The fundamental idea is that in a dark forest any kind of sentient life form is going to snuff out any other sentient life form because of the threat that could arise.

Do we want an existence like that or do we want to see if there is a way to build certainly within our globe small neighborhood technological explosions and asymmetries that close the gaps between powers and middle powers? I think we need to figure out a better way than just maximally driving toward singular national interests as defined by who happens to be the head of state at the moment. Again, this is not super-wishful thinking, but there are ways that we could work toward the common good where folks benefit, which might not to be only to the maximum interests of one state.

KEVIN MALONEY: Going back to symptom versus cause, one of the things that is very concerning from my perspective is this kind of rejection of the “pluralism sandbox” domestically in the United States. I think people before wanted to always play in that sandbox and there was a big political spectrum to an extent, and now I think there are illiberal actors looking for the right moment to destroy the sandbox.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: I don’t think that is true actually, Kevin. I think it is true on the macro level, on the national level, but it is absolutely not true on the community level.

KEVIN MALONEY: I agree with that. City councils are still where people can smile at each other and get stuff done.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: City councils, towns, cities. The problem is somehow we are able to separate what is going on in our community—we want our neighbors to do well, we want the houses not to deteriorate and their kids who play with our kids, we want all that kind of stuff—but for whatever reason we cannot seem to amplify that to the national level. There it is a battle between coastal and Midwestern, urban and suburban, and I think somewhere along the way we lost our commonality, that we are all Americans and we are all working toward this American project, and we are polarized. Maybe that is the art, figuring out how we bridge from community to state and national.

KEVIN MALONEY: I completely agree with you. My point was more the levers of power. There are what we think about at the Council, “good-faith” and “bad-faith” actors, and from my perspective it seems like there is a multiplication of bad-faith actors outside of this pluralistic “sandbox,” whether that is from the tech industry, politically, or fill in the blank. So, yes, how do we get back to first principles, the pluralistic America that surfaces at the highest levels?

To my original point, as that reflection becomes anti-pluralistic, you get a reflection of that at the foreign policy level in terms of what people are wanting to push forward. I was thinking about that connection. Naturally if you have a more liberal—not “liberal” politically but from a values perspective—government, you are going to have a better appetite for this system of cooperation that we have attempted to push forward in the past decades.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: One of the ways to close the gap is potentially accountability in the electoral sphere, in courts, and things of that nature. In the international sphere I see our allies figuring out how to navigate the next three-and-a-half years and instead of an accountability approach it is placating and pandering and catering that will only invite additional predatory behavior, and maybe that is the way you navigate the next three-and-a-half years, but certainly that does not help with the accountability mechanism where you could potentially—

Trump is not a strong guy. I think where he sees weakness and vulnerability he exploits it. His worldview in a lot of ways is not all that dissimilar to Putin’s. Small and medium states he can predate, and with larger states he opts to glad-hand and talk with or pander to. Putin’s worldview is that there are three powers, Russia, China, and the United States. I think Trump agrees with that general idea and that those are the tough deals. Everybody else you put the squeeze on.

The European Union should be a tough deal and can be a formidable way to institute some accountability. I think the calculations are totally understandable: Is it worth taking a substantial economic hit in an environment where you have a far right that is looming and economic weakness could drive that and result in a similar hostile takeover of the values in Europe, so I understand it, but I know it does not help us get to accountability and correction.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to pull back to the 30,000-foot level, and you talk about it a bit in the book, through the lens of Ukraine. You mentioned before a future where U.S. foreign policy is driven by transactional diplomacy, dealmaking, and we take our sphere of influence, let Russia have theirs, let China have theirs, and retreat into our “realist, nationalist bubbles.” Could you talk a little bit about that pathway?

Another pathway would be a reimagining in some way to think about this liberal international order. What does that look like moving forward? I am not asking you to use a crystal ball here in terms of what it is going to be, but if you were talking to policymakers, how would you be framing that?

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: I think I do have a bit of a crystal ball. In this dark scenario that has a reasonable chance of unfolding we are talking about many more nuclear states, so the existential threat is amplified. We are talking about great-power competitors that amplify their strength, so China seizes Taiwan and builds out a privileged sphere, and Taiwan is a way to project it. It certainly has access to interesting new means with regard to technology but it also solidifies its claim to the South China and East China Seas and principal influence over the Asia-Pacific. I think there is the potential for confrontation between China and India in that kind of scenario, so a lot of regional instability will be part of the theme.

Russia continues with its empire-building project whether de facto or de jure, so by occupying or putting in friendly regimes, and is in a position to exert its singular influence over its neighborhood and does not end there but potentially looks to exploit factors with regard to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union.

In this kind of world the United States is isolated and consolidates its strength in the Western Hemisphere. We have not been very good at it, but somehow let’s say miraculously we build North-South lines and have strong relationships between the Americas or something of that nature, but in the meantime what do we lose? We lose our biggest trading partners in Europe, we lose our relationships with the leading democracies of the world while authoritarian regimes surge, we have much more chaos and instability that even if we retrench may necessitate our involvement in places like the Middle East, like we find ourselves dragged back to periodically because we are still reliant on fossil fuels even now when we export at this point based on the energy revolution and so forth. It is a much more difficult and challenging world for the next generation.

It depends on how much damage the Trump administration does, but what I see here is that there is likely to be a backlash against this transactional base valueless approach from the Trump administration. That door is going to open up by abuses of American population, by economic hardships, and there is an opportunity to reject this kind of approach if we have the right leaders step up and articulate a vision and build an American society that delivers more services to more people who were left behind and certainly takes advantage of and rebuilds relationships.

Biden demonstrated this pretty effectively in 2020. In the midst of some crises he rebuilt diplomatic relationships that had suffered under the Trump administration, and I think the opportunities are going to be there. Our allies are going to look to embrace us, maybe a little more skeptically and maybe with some more hesitancy and more hedging, but I think there is an opportunity to rebuild those types of relationships also. There are enormous risks from the Trump administration but also enormous opportunities.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think there is still an opportunity for a significant swing back. We talk about the values of the U.S. population domestically. I tend to agree that we are not at the precipice yet where a swing back cannot happen, so it will be interesting to watch that closely.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: Let me mention very quickly, I don’t think we are going to get there. I think there are going to be huge issues. I think there is going to be an attempt to use force against the civilian population. I think that is the whole idea of exploding the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget. I think there is going to be mucking around with regard to elections in certain regards, gerrymandering districts, but also on the horizon I think is a potential explosion of people power that is irresistible.

If I am wrong, it is because the American people stay timid and silent as their rights get stripped away, but we tend to be a feisty, fiery lot with lots of fights if you look at the history of the United States, and when push comes to shove we will shove back, and I think that is what ultimately—it will not necessarily be violent; it will just be mass protests or people showing up in elections in unprecedented numbers. There is some evidence of that happening. I am a glass-half-full kind of guy.

KEVIN MALONEY: Good to hear. Again, going back to something we think about a lot at the Council is what does moral resilience look like from an individual level but then also from a political and business level. What role can you play in an open society? That toolkit has certainly not been taken away.

I had an interview last week with a moral philosopher and we talked about defeating nihilism in this moment and what that means in terms of these bigger existential questions in international relations but also the feeling of that politically in the United States and other countries. It certainly is on our mind at the Council, and we will be watching that closely.

I want to close by going back to the current situation in Ukraine specifically. For me it feels like there has been this roller-coaster of a U.S.-Ukraine relationship the first few months of Trump 2.0. We had the low point of the Oval Office meeting and Elbridge Colby pulling arms shipments in the middle of the night, and then you have Trump, probably based on anger toward Putin versus love for Zelenskyy, sending nuclear submarines to the region and saying, “There is a deadline,” etc.

It is so hard to read this situation from an outsider’s perspective. How are you reading the current situation geopolitically and the relationship between the United States and Ukraine?

To close the interview I want to get your thoughts on what we think about here at the Council as “just” justice. What does a just peace look like for you and Ukraine in terms of ending the conflict?

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs in March that looked at the arc of Trump and Ukraine. One of the things I was most concerned about was completely cutting Ukraine off in the initial stages to cater to Putin and his animus for Ukraine, his disregard for smaller states, and because of deft diplomacy by our allies with regular visits and Zelenskyy in spite of that Oval Office visit—I think that was actually an important moment because it probably garnered some respect from Trump. He is not a particularly reflective guy, but he doesn’t like folks who are weak; he likes tougher guys, and Zelenskyy was not a pushover. He couldn’t be because he is leading his country in a war.

I actually wrote that I thought it would be a six-month time horizon before Trump reforms, based on hard learning, mainly recognizing that it is not the Ukrainians who are the impediment to his desire for peace and the way he wants to present himself as a peacemaker, Nobel candidate, and stuff like that. It is not the Europeans who are not pulling their share. They are pledging to kick in 5 percent, and Ukraine is willing to bend over bend over backwards; it is Putin who keeps pulling the rug out from under him.

I wrote and repeatedly said that I could see six months down the road—and we are there now—that he would ultimately pivot to this more hardnosed approach in which he potentially returns to at least the status quo ante, meaning there won’t be further presidential drawdowns but there will be sales of weapons. That was another question. I thought he was going to do it, and he is going to do it. He is going to sell weapons to the Europeans and Ukrainians.

I am struck by how much of this was actually not unpredictable but quite predictable in that if you look at the fact that Putin was going to be unyielding and nudge Trump’s fractious approach anyway, that the Ukrainians were going to act on their urgency to try to keep the United States involved, the Europeans this way, and that Trump is self-serving this was all relatively predictable. The piece made this case pretty holistically.

I think you can in the motivations of individuals and states gain an understanding of how things are going to go. I was relatively confident that the United States was going to strike at Iran and that Israel was going to get its way dragging us into their war, particularly because they were effective and it provided a moment of weakness and unique opportunity for the United States.

Again, I don’t want to overstate this, but there are good people out there who can look at what is going on without even exquisite intelligence and can largely make out the outlines of how things are going to go. It is not a completely an opaque, black hole-type situation. I don’t know if you can do that as well over longer time horizons. I think you can do it the way I made the case over the medium range with low and high probabilities in different time horizons. That is a way to talk about it that is an analyst’s tradecraft.

Quickly with regard to Ukraine I would say that a just peace is one that ends this war sooner rather than later, that gets us as close to status quo ante, February 2022, where Russia has little to nothing to show for its full-scale war and can still claim and retain de facto control over Crimea and the Donbas that they have been occupying for more than ten years. It is a full peace deferred that will take years and a change in regime in Russia to delineate the territories to look like something closer to 1991. I think it is going to be one in which Russia retains some territory, most notably Crimea and portions of the Donbas. The Ukrainians are willing to accept that kind of outcome to end the war and then let negotiations in time deal with the situation.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think you have made the neo-idealist case at the end for what a just peace looks like. I appreciate you laying out the vision there and all the insights you have shared with the Values & Interests audience today. I appreciate you joining us.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN: This was excellent, probably one of the most interesting conversations I have had in a while. I like the values and interests approach. Excellent.