For it is the US and its allies, I argue, that have enabled the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine. The West’s failings to constrain Russian aggression and harden Ukraine against it have nourished the Russian sense of impunity.
–Alexander Vindman, The Folly of Realism, p. 3
In his introduction, author Alexander Vindman describes the history of America’s foreign policy with the Soviet Union/Russia with respect to Ukraine. During and following the Cold War, the foreign policy actions were based on what he describes as “realism.” This was associated with Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Kenneth Waltz, and held national interest as its highest goal.
Realism was a reaction to the Wilsonian era’s idea of promoting American values of democracy and freedom and of “making the world safe for democracy.” Vindman calls this view “liberalism.”
The author argues for a foreign policy stance that he labels “neo-liberalism,” one that, in short, promotes national interests while also promoting national values. It was developed by Benjamin Tallis.
Vindman writes (pp. 8-9) “Neo-liberalism demands using a more nuanced and coherent understanding of interest, viewed through our values, along with other important inputs, to determine a compass heading for a US foreign policy approach.”
Vindman claims that in practice, neo-liberalism will provide the stability in foreign relations that realism seeks but is incapable of delivering because it is transactional in nature and dependent on the actions of others.
Yeah, that’s all very abstract. And that’s just the introduction.
Thoughts:
I confess that I don’t know jack about Ukrainian history. There was the Pale of Settlement, and the Holodomor, but outside of that, it was a big chunk of land in Eastern Europe and a former Soviet Republic (kids, ask your grandparents), so reading the brief medieval and Renaissance history that I knew nothing of was nice, if a bit depressing.
The rest of the book is a history (with maps) of Ukraine, beginning with the settlement of a people now known as the Kyivan Rus from roughly present-day St. Petersburg to Kyiv, and whose hegemony lasted from the 9th to the 12th centuries, C.E. From this group sprang both the Ukrainians and later the Russians.
Enter the 20th century. Vindman shows how the US, in its dealings with Russia and former Soviet states, seemed—almost without fail—to choose the wrong door every chance it got because it saw Russia as the big kid on the block. The US didn’t want to anger nuclear-capable Russia. With the right incentives, Russia could become a functioning democracy, ya know. Ukraine and other former Soviet republics—like Chechnya—are nice, and the US certainly didn’t want them to fail, but it would only go so far with its support. Sink or swim, boys.
And the US expected the republics to play nice. Ukraine, for example, had to give up the Soviet-era nuclear weapons on its soil. In return, the US would, uh, offer promises of support—not Article V support as if Ukraine were a member of NATO or anything. But criminey—Ukraine had the third largest collection of nukes in the world, and we can’t have that! So, let’s get together in Budapest and hammer out a deal in 1994 that it would take the Russians twenty years to violate with the annexation of Crimea.
Actually, the situation was a little more complicated than that: The US did give aid to Ukraine in the form of cash and non-weapons-grade uranium. It considered the matter finished, however. The point was to get the weapons out of Ukrainian hands and into Russian hands, not to bolster Ukrainian democracy. When Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the US applied sanctions to Russia and told them, in effect, “Now you stop that!”
I am poking fun, but this and other incidents are deadly serious. People lost their lives. With the Russian incursion (“Special military operation,” huh? It’s a war!), people are losing their lives every day.
Smarter people than I (there are more than a few) have argued the merits of foreign policy actions and inaction endlessly. Could Vindman’s prescriptions have been followed to happier outcomes in the past? Can they lead to better outcomes in the future? I don’t know. I lack the expertise and experience to say one way or the other. To my inexpert eye, he makes a good prima facie case for the US trying to plan in the long term as opposed to reacting in the short term.
I also see the football being dropped in the past. I see needless suffering and the expansionist and damnable invasion of a sovereign land. Ukraine is a sovereign land not because it was permitted to be one, but simply because it wishes to be one.
Vindman’s writing style is clear and, for the most part, free of jargon. He did use two words I had to look up. I found them both appropriate for the material: 1) revanche: the policy of a state intent on regaining areas of its original territory that have been lost to other states as a result of war, a treaty signed under duress, etc. and 2) irredentism: the acquisition or annexation of a region previously included in another country because of cultural, historical, ethnic, racial, or other ties, or advocacy for such an acquisition.
Nor is the book overly long. At about 240 pages of text (plus notes, acknowledgments, bibliographies, etc.), it is not something a reader has to dedicate too much time to. If you are interested in the topic, this should be an intriguing read.
It’s hard to say I enjoyed this, as it hurt to watch smart, well-meaning people fumble the ball so many times. But I learned a lot. It made me think.
Vindman, who immigrated to the US as a toddler with his family from Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, has dedicated the book “to those killed in the Russia-Ukraine War…May we learn to avoid such tragedies.”
Bio: Alexander Vindman (b. 1975) is a retired Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, was the director for European Affairs on the White House Security Council, a former political-military affairs officer for the Pentagon, and an attaché at the American embassies in Moscow and Kyiv. He became a national figure for his testimony during the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. His earlier book is titled Here, Right Matters.
Title: The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself about Russia and Betrayed Ukraine
Author: Alexander Vindman
First published: 2025
Length: nonfiction book
Reviews of Old and New Stories. Mostly Old 
That sounds like a very interesting and informative book. I did not realize that Alexander Vindman emigrated from Ukraine to the US as a child. You wrote and excellent post and review.
Thank you for you kind words. It is interesting and informative—if a bit depressing. I’d be interested to know what you think of it if you read it.
It is on my TBR list
Fantastic! I look forward to seeing what you think of it—good or bad.
As someone who lived through the last decades of the Cold War, had a relative who was a Colombian diplomat who once was a consular staffer in Leningrad, and a guy who studied both Russian history and international relations in college, I think American foreign policy re Russia has always been flawed and too dependent on wishful thinking. Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which the Reagan Administration helped to accelerate in the 1980s. Soviet-style Communism was bad, but its disappearance left many of its adherents bitter and angry, especially since many prominent American conservatives slapped themselves on the back about how the U.S. was now the only superpower left standing. This is one of the reasons why many Russians tolerate Putin and the oligarchs, even though they’re essentially Mafia dons, Slavic style.
Hey, Alex. Thanks for the comment. Vindman doesn’t address that particular flaw, but I can understand that. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t and who laughs at you—even if the one you know causes cases of falling-out-of-window illness. At least he’s one of ours.
You might find Vindman’s book interesting.
As for American conservatives… they’ve gone from slapping themselves on the back to, well, bootlicking and being only too happy to spread Russian propaganda. I believe Stalin had a term for that—it’ll come to me…
But I digress. 🙂
Oo! Oo! I know this one!
Useful idiots.
The term, which was commonly used in the depths of the Cold, referred to non-communists (usually well-meaning liberals) who nevertheless were susceptible to Communist propaganda and unwittingly disseminated it in the U.S. and other Western countries. It’s been attributed to Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, alias Lenin, but there’s no record of his ever using that exact phrase.
LOL