thenation | President Trump campaigned and was
elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US
involvement in areas where, he believed, America had no vital strategic
interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente
(“cooperation”) with Moscow.
And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional
testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not
share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was
true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them seemed
prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine,
though whether retroactively because of Moscow’s 2014 annexation of
Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a
career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as
ambassador to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in
Kiev, that she did not share the new American president’s thinking
about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his
own administration, even in the White House, by opponents of his foreign
policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.
