Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman reiterated before Congress on Tuesday that he found President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky troubling — not just because the president seemed to have requested a Ukrainian investigation into his political rival, but because the nature of Trump’s request threatened bipartisan support for strong U.S.-Ukraine relations.
The United States has long considered Ukraine’s presence in the Western European camp important, particularly in regard to national security. But until Trump, the U.S. did little to act on this. Trump changed that, approving military aid, intelligence action, and political support to better obstruct Russian aggression in Ukraine — something former President Barack Obama had been hesitant to do.
Trump should have just left it at that, according to Vindman. He also politicized his relationship with Zelensky, and in doing so, put at risk the U.S. national security interests in the region.
Vindman is right that national security issues must be bipartisan. The U.S. has legitimate military interests in Ukraine, and bringing Joe Biden’s name into the mix, as Trump did during his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, muddied the waters. As a result, bipartisan support for a strong alliance with Ukraine could erode — especially in Congress, where Republicans are trying to distance Trump from the Democrats’ impeachment investigation, and Democrats, in turn, are attempting to establish a quid pro quo between Trump and Ukraine.
But the U.S.’s relationship with Ukraine had become political long before Trump stepped into office. And Ukraine, too, stoked partisan tensions by meddling in the 2016 election, disseminating information about the Trump campaign to the media, and helping Hillary Clinton’s allies conduct opposition research.
Trump certainly crossed a line, but that line has been drawn, erased, and redrawn dozens of times. U.S. national security concerns in Ukraine are important, but they’ve been overtly political for a long time, and Trump isn’t the only one to blame.
