Alex Vindman 🇺🇸

Dad. Husband. Vet. Ex National Security Council/White House Staff.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

The Strongmen Are Losing
Serbia and Brazil voted on the same day, and both said no.

On Sunday, voters in two very different countries delivered the same verdict. In Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, who has ruled with near-absolute power for 14 years and carried Vladimir Putin's endorsement into the race, conceded defeat to the Students' List, a movement born of protests after a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in 2024 and killed 16 people. Serbians saw that tragedy for what it was: the product of corruption, cronyism and a government that answered to itself. Turnout was the highest since 2000. Vučić blamed independent media, unnamed European governments and an "American deep state." He lost anyway, by roughly half a million votes.

Hours later in Brazil, Lula da Silva came from behind to defeat Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president and the candidate Donald Trump welcomed to the White House this summer. It was the first time since 1985 that the first-round runner-up won Brazil's presidency. Trump's tariffs were meant as leverage over Latin America's largest economy. Instead, Brazilians treated the election as a question of sovereignty and chose not to hand their country to Washington's preferred candidate. Bolsonaro is reportedly refusing to concede, a page from a familiar playbook.

Add Hungary, where Viktor Orbán, Europe's model for illiberal democracy and a favorite of both Trump and Putin, was swept from power in April, and a pattern emerges. The strongman brand of grievance, corruption and foreign patronage is running into a wall: voters who want accountable government. Being endorsed by Putin or embraced by Trump has become a liability, not an asset.

None of these victories is guaranteed to last. Vučić's machine will not disappear overnight, Brazil remains deeply divided, and the hard work of governing starts now. But the lesson for democrats everywhere is clear. Strongmen look invincible until people show up and vote.

Israelis vote tomorrow. Americans vote in nine days.

Your vote is your voice. And it’s powerful!

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Trump’s October surprise: Is it a carrier rearming for new strikes on Iran, nine days before Election Day? A war he started with no plan and no exit, is escalating so that he looks strong at the polls.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Putin's diesel arrives in New York Nov 7 aboard the Agioi Fanendes: 40,000 tons, the first Russian fuel cargo since 2022. It's coming in on a Treasury license that sidesteps federal law. New York should refuse to be the loading dock for Putin's war chest. 🧵 1/5

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

@Malinowski Thanks, Tom!

[Tom Malinowski @Malinowski]

Great thread below about the first incoming (and illegal) Russian diesel shipment to the US.

Keep in mind that if "New York" is the destination, that actually means New Jersey, where the oil terminal is.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Same pattern: use American support for Ukraine as leverage for political gain, then deny it when caught. That's why he's suddenly scrambling, calling Musk to restore service while his team blames Musk. Congress should find out who gave the order.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Trump says he "was not involved" in throttling Ukraine's Starshield, and he's shifting the blame to Musk because this resembles the 1st impeachment too closely. But Musk says the US government owns and controls Starshield, and that limits are decided by the military and ultimately the President. Musk couldn't do this without the go-ahead from Trump and his administration.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

What are the underlying consistencies with the 1st impeachment? Back then, he froze aid to Ukraine to extract an investigation into Biden to steal the 2020 election. This time, he undercut support to Ukraine to land the diesel deal and score a PR win on the presumption of lower fuel costs. Why? To rig the midterm elections.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

To be clear, this diesel deal is nothing but a Trump PR stunt that will do nothing to lower costs and make life affordable for Americans. New York State and New York City should not be complicit in it.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Putin's diesel arrives in New York Nov 7 aboard the Agioi Fanendes: 40,000 tons, the first Russian fuel cargo since 2022. It's coming in on a Treasury license that sidesteps federal law. New York should refuse to be the loading dock for Putin's war chest. 🧵 1/5

[Reuters @Reuters]

EXCLUSIVE: Tanker carrying 40,000 T of Russian diesel heads to New York after Putin-Trump deal, data shows https://t.co/dE9gyWoWb7 https://t.co/dE9gyWoWb7

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Then go to federal court. NY's AG should sue to void GL 135 and ask a judge to hold the cargo at the dock until the court rules. DEC, which licenses NY's oil terminals, should demand proof the cargo is legal. NYC should join the suit. Impound it. Let the courts decide. 5/5

[Eugene Vindman @YVindman]

⚠️ I've been commuting to D.C. for years. But these days, I'm fighting more than just traffic.

I'm taking on corruption in Congress, fighting to ban congressional stock trading, and making sure Washington works for hardworking Virginians.

Watch my ad.

[Senator Andy Kim @SenatorAndyKim]

Trump and Elon can point fingers at each other all they want but this has endangered soldiers and civilians in Ukraine.

No private citizen, let alone a trillionaire, should be able to order or direct vital national security actions to appease a President’s grudges.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

LIVE with Rebecca Bennett, Candidate for NJ-7, and Congressman Eugene Vindman, VA-7
In this week’s Substack Live, I sat down with Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot and test pilot running for Congress in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District, before being joined by my twin brother, Congressman Eugene Vindman, for a discussion about Ukraine, American leadership, corruption, and the stakes of the upcoming midterm elections.

Why It Matters is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Rebecca Bennett: From Navy Test Pilot to Congress

Bennett discussed her path from military service to healthcare and ultimately to public office. Motivated by the September 11 attacks, she joined the Navy, deployed to the Middle East aboard the USS Nimitz in support of the Afghanistan war, and went on to become an experimental test pilot, helping develop and safely evaluate aircraft technology for the United States and its partners. After leaving active duty, she earned an MBA from Wharton and worked in healthcare, including oncology, gastrointestinal care, and women’s health.

Now running in one of the country’s most competitive congressional districts, Bennett emphasized the importance of putting country over party, confronting corruption, banning congressional stock trading, and getting dark money out of politics. She also discussed her campaign’s grassroots support, including more than 1,400 volunteers and 1.4 million voter contacts.

If elected, Bennett wants to focus on infrastructure and national security. She highlighted the Gateway Tunnel project, which is critical to commuters traveling between New Jersey and New York, and called for greater congressional oversight of the military and a more effective approach to defense acquisition. Drawing on her experience as a test pilot, she argued that the United States needs to rethink how it develops and fields military technology to meet 21st-century security challenges. She also stressed the need to protect women serving in the military and invest more seriously in women’s health.

Please donate to Rebecca’s congressional campaign, here. https://t.co/SEk89fpTC7

Congressman Eugene Vindman: Ukraine, American Leadership, and Accountability

In the second half, Congressman Eugene Vindman joined us to discuss the growing pressure on Ukraine and the consequences of the Trump administration’s approach to the war. He described President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal to bipartisan members of Congress for continued American support, restored Starlink access, and additional air defense to protect Ukrainian civilians.

We discussed the damage that abandoning Ukraine could inflict on American credibility, our relationships with NATO allies and European partners, and U.S. national interests. The conversation also explored the dangers of allowing powerful private actors to influence decisions with profound consequences for people around the world. When American technology and services can be withdrawn at the whim of political leaders, other countries have reason to question whether the United States remains a reliable partner.

We then turned to the midterm elections and the need to hold the administration accountable. Eugene described the election as a referendum on a presidency characterized by what he calls the three Cs: chaos, cruelty, and corruption. He argued that rising costs, including grocery and fuel prices, have compounded the consequences of the administration’s policies and that voters deserve both accountability and a positive agenda to make life more affordable.

We closed on a principle that applies well beyond any one election: restoring public trust requires confronting corruption and restoring integrity to government. As Eugene put it, “You can’t have reconciliation without accountability.”

Watch the full conversation for a discussion of the next generati

on of veteran leaders, the fight to defend democracy at home and abroad, and what is at stake in the coming elections.
https://t.co/eR6kw5dxZD

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

My twin, Congressman VA-07 @RepVindman, and Congressional Candidate NJ-07 Rebecca Bennett @RebeccaForNJ07 join me. We will discuss the midterm elections and the breaking news around the Ukraine War.

Substack Live TODAY at 1:30pm ET https://t.co/A7m2rP2vXp

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Trump Crushes “Buy American” and Makes China Look Like a Reliable Partner

The United States spent years convincing its allies that dependence on Chinese technology was a national security risk. What happens when American technology becomes a tool of political coercion?

On October 14, Ukraine faced another night of Russian ballistic missile attacks without the reliable advance warning it had come to expect from the United States. Around the same time, Ukrainian forces discovered that their Starlink and Starshield connections had been restricted. Drones lost connectivity, missions were disrupted, and Ukraine is left more exposed to future air attacks.

Elon Musk offered an explanation that should concern every American ally and any American trading partner dependent on U.S. technology and industrial products. Decisions about the use of Starshield, he wrote, are made by the U.S. military and, ultimately, the president. The White House characterized the disruption as a glitch, while Ukrainian officials questioned whether it was deliberate. Recent reporting has Musk proposing to Trump restrictions on Starshield services. While the precise chain of responsibility remains disputed, the strategic implications could end up being disastrous.

Governments around the world are seeing a demonstration of what happens when a government and a critical technology provider collude to restrict critical service to a country. Trump’s and Musk’s petulance, vindictiveness, and transactional ego-driven self-service will have real economic and geo-political consequences.

On the National Security Council, I saw this problem from the other side.

The warning we gave Europe about Huawei

During my time at the National Security Council, my colleagues and I worked to persuade European allies to reject Huawei’s 5G technology. The concern was not simply that Huawei was a Chinese company, or that we distrusted Beijing. It was that telecommunications infrastructure is foundational to modern society and national defense. Whoever controls critical components of that infrastructure may possess capabilities that extend far beyond the product being sold.

A compromised telecommunications network can expose sensitive information, facilitate surveillance, disrupt communications, or create opportunities to manipulate systems. Remote access, software updates, and privileged administrative controls can become vulnerabilities if a supplier—or the government capable of compelling that supplier—chooses to exploit them.

China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law reinforced these concerns by requiring Chinese organizations and citizens to support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence work, subject to the law’s provisions. European security officials had to consider what that meant if a Chinese supplier occupied a position inside their critical infrastructure. The European Union itself identified the danger of hostile governments pressuring vendors or using national legal requirements to obtain access.

The argument was straightforward: do not allow a potential adversary to establish a position inside systems essential to your national security when that position could be exploited against you.

The same underlying concern has surfaced in other sectors. Reports about communications equipment found on Chinese-made port cranes prompted questions about whether ostensibly ordinary industrial machinery could provide an avenue for surveillance or disruption. Reports of unexplained communications equipment in Chinese solar inverters raised similar alarms about the security of energy infrastructure.

These cases are not identical, and the existence of a vulnerability does not establish that it has been exploited. But prudent governments do not wait for sabotage to occur before considering the consequences of dependence.

That was the logic behind the Huawei campaign. It was a legitimate national security argument, and it remains one today.

The problem is not exclusively Chinese

Starlink is not Huawei. SpaceX is an American company operating within a different legal and political system. The United States is not China, and an American company is not automatically an instrument of the American government. Nor does every service restriction amount to sabotage or coercion.

That matters, but it does not eliminate the underlying vulnerability.

Starlink has become essential to Ukraine’s battlefield communications, connecting troops, supporting logistics, and enabling the operation of drones. Its resilience against Russian electronic warfare has made it particularly valuable. Ukraine’s dependence developed because the system worked when other communications options were vulnerable or unavailable.

That success created a strategic liability: a substantial part of Ukraine’s military capability depended on a privately operated network that Ukraine did not control.

The October restrictions exposed the consequences. According to Ukrainian officials, changes affecting terminals operating at high speeds disrupted drone missions. Reports of the restrictions coincided with mounting U.S. pressure on Kyiv over its attacks on Russian oil infrastructure. The timing naturally raised questions about whether technology access had become another instrument of political leverage. And while the administration has disputed responsibility for the disruption, and the available evidence does not establish a definitive explanation for every affected connection, the pattern of administration actions, reporting, including President Zelenskyy’s assertions, and leaks, indicate a Trump administration pressure campaign is in play.

A country planning its defense cannot afford to treat uncertainty about access to a critical system as a minor inconvenience.

This is the distinction that policymakers sometimes miss: a security vulnerability does not require malicious code or a hidden backdoor. Sometimes the vulnerability is the ability to manipulate or turn the system off.

A supplier does not need to spy on a customer or secretly compromise its software to create strategic dependence. It may be enough to retain the ability to withdraw service, restrict functionality, change the terms of access, or make continued access contingent on political decisions.

That is a different mechanism from a covert backdoor, but the strategic consequence can be similar. A country discovers that a capability it believed it possessed is conditional on someone else’s decisions.

And the problem is much bigger than just defense systems. U.S. companies can be directed to restrict any industrial system through remote access.

Assured access is a national security commitment

In my years working on national security policy, we understood that allies need more than promises of support. They need consistency and confidence that the capabilities on which they depend will remain available when the stakes are highest.

That is what assured access means in practice.

It is one thing to purchase an American system because it offers superior performance. It is another to build your national defense around that system while assuming that commercial contracts, political commitments, and strategic interests will remain aligned indefinitely.

They may not.

In March 2025, the Trump administration suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine and paused military assistance, creating enormous pressure on Kyiv to accept Washington’s terms. The interruption demonstrated that access to essential American support could be used as leverage in negotiations with a country fighting for its survival.

The last time Washington pulled that lever, the results showed up on the map. The March 2025 pause helped finish off Ukraine’s already embattled incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Kyiv drew the obvious lesson and spent the following year reducing its dependence on American support, building its own long-range strike support capabilities and intelligence tools. What Ukrainian planners did not anticipate was that the United States would reach into Ukraine’s defense itself, into the early warning that gives civilians time to reach shelter and the satellite links that keep defensive systems protecting Ukrainian cities operational.

This disruption won’t change the course of the war. Ukraine has had a strong year on the battlefield, retaking ground after Russia lost its illicit access to Starlink, according to U.S. intelligence cited in press reports. But it might matter, and the fact that it might is deeply disturbing. A country fighting for its survival should never have to plan around whether its own ally’s systems will stay on.

The lesson for allies is not that the United States will always abandon them. It is that American systems functioning as presumed can no longer be assumed and are not insulated from the fitful political preferences of the president or the decisions of powerful private actors.

The Anthropic dispute shows the same structural problem in a different form: when the company resisted Pentagon demands over the use of its AI systems for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, the administration moved to exclude it from government work and designated it a supply-chain risk. It illustrates how quickly a company can be complicit or coerced on acceptable uses, and the consequences of refusing demands.

These are fundamental questions about whether democratic systems, open markets, and a capitalist economy should allow companies or governments to establish back doors to retain control over systems. Without consideration for any of the important questions either in support or opposition to these fundamental issues, Trump and Musk recklessly changed the game around allyship and commerce. The simple fact is that governments can no longer be confident they are procuring reliable systems for legitimate national defense purposes.

If a company can be punished for resisting government demands, and a country can lose access to a critical service amid a political dispute, every customer has reason to reconsider the risks of dependence.

Europe is already looking for alternatives

European officials understand the implications.

EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius has warned that Europe is heavily dependent on American space capabilities and has argued for developing European alternatives. The European Union’s IRIS satellite constellation is intended to provide secure communications under European control. Germany has also pursued plans for dedicated military satellite capabilities. Existing alternatives offer potential options, but building a comprehensive, resilient, sovereign system takes time and substantial investment.

The point is not that Europe can simply replace Starlink tomorrow. It cannot. The point is that the incentive to reduce dependence has grown.

And the hedging has already spread beyond defense. France is moving 2.5 million civil servants off Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Webex to a homegrown system by 2027, with officials citing Microsoft’s cancellation of the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s email after U.S. sanctions and the reliance on Starlink in Ukraine. Earlier this month, the Dutch tax authority abandoned its move to Microsoft’s cloud over security concerns and the risk of lock-in. Austria’s military, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and Danish cities are switching to open-source tools.

Ukrainian defense innovators have reached a similar conclusion: a military cannot rely on one solution that can be switched off. Redundancy is not wasteful duplication when the system in question is essential to survival. It is a basic requirement of resilience.

The same debate has surrounded the F-35. European governments have had to weigh the aircraft’s extraordinary capabilities against concerns about long-term dependence on American software, maintenance, spare parts, and export controls. Public discussion of a supposed F-35 “kill switch” has often blurred technical questions with political fears; there is no publicly established evidence of a literal remote kill switch that can simply ground every aircraft at Washington’s command. Yet the underlying concerns about dependence and sovereign control are real.

European efforts to procure weapons and technologies less constrained by U.S. export-control rules reflect a broader desire for freedom of action. American export controls, including ITAR, serve legitimate purposes. But if allies believe those controls or access to supporting technology could be used unpredictably to restrict their options, they will look for alternatives.

Every new dependency comes with a political calculation. The more uncertain the relationship, the more attractive it becomes to pay for a second source.

Trust is part of the product

The implications extend well beyond satellites and weapons.

In fiscal year 2025, the State Department reported $331 billion in U.S. arms transfers to foreign partners, up from $318.7 billion the year before. That total includes $104.4 billion in government-to-government Foreign Military Sales and $226.8 billion in direct commercial sales licensed by the State Department. These are sales approved in a single year, with deliveries spread over many more, so the figure is best understood as a pipeline of business that depends on allies’ confidence in American reliability.

Those sales support American manufacturers, engineers, skilled workers, and communities across the country. They sustain production lines, research, and a defense industrial base that also serves U.S. forces.

Florida has a substantial stake in that business. Its aerospace, defense, space, and advanced technology sectors depend in part on a global market for American capabilities. Contracts and jobs in these industries are supported not just by the quality of American hardware, but by the confidence that customers can count on it.

And that confidence is not limited to weapons. America exports roughly $655 billion a year in digitally delivered services, from software and cloud computing to engineering and finance, and that trade depends on customers believing we won’t switch them off.

Modern aircraft, vehicles, cloud services, industrial control systems, and energy infrastructure increasingly rely on software, remote diagnostics, connected services, and over-the-air updates. A product may be manufactured in one country, operated in another, and dependent on software or network access controlled from a third. The ability to maintain, update, monitor, or disable those systems can become a source of leverage.

Customers pay for more than a machine or a connection. They pay for reliability, continuity, security, and the confidence that the product will function when they need it.

Trust is part of the product.

If Washington allows political disputes to undermine that trust, the costs will not necessarily appear immediately in a canceled contract or a public diplomatic rupture. They may emerge over years as allies diversify suppliers, build parallel systems, favor domestic production, and discount American promises of long-term support.

The resulting loss could be much greater than the value of any single contract.

Beijing does not have to win the argument

China’s leaders will not overlook the opportunity.

For years, Washington has warned that Chinese technology creates unacceptable risks because Beijing may be able to pressure its companies into serving state interests. Now Chinese officials and vendors can point to a different example: an American satellite network whose availability has become entangled in a dispute between Washington and a partner at war.

Beijing does not have to prove that Chinese systems are safer. It only has to persuade customers that American systems carry their own political risks.

That argument will not erase the differences between China’s political system and America’s. It will not eliminate concerns about Chinese intelligence laws, state influence, espionage, or coercion. Nor does one episode establish that American technology is inherently unreliable.

But it complicates the case the United States has made to the world.

We told our allies that critical infrastructure should not depend on technology controlled by a potential adversary. We argued that the legal obligations and political incentives surrounding a supplier mattered as much as the technical specifications of its equipment. We urged them to consider what could happen if access were compromised or withdrawn at the worst possible moment.

Those arguments were right.

They are right when applied to China. They are right when applied to American suppliers, too.

The difference is not that every American company poses the same risk as Huawei, or that every restriction imposed by Washington is illegitimate. The difference lies in rational national security-driven decision-making, the legal safeguards, political institutions, accountability mechanisms, and demonstrated behavior that shape the risk. Those protections are valuable, but they must be credible. They cannot be taken for granted when the government itself appears willing to use access to essential technology as political leverage.

The United States should not abandon its leadership in advanced technology. It should make that leadership more dependable. That means transparent rules, enforceable commitments, meaningful oversight, clear limits on political interference.

It also means accepting a basic reality: allies will protect themselves when they can no longer confidently distinguish a commercial relationship from a political vulnerability.

The United States spent years warning Europe about the dangers of letting Chinese products inside its critical systems. We should remember why we made that argument.

The question was never simply who made the technology. It was who could control it, under what circumstances, and what would happen if they decided to use that control against you.

With the Trump Administration’s actions against Ukraine, we haven’t just made a move - we’ve entirely changed the game and how it is played.

[Alex Vindman 🇺🇸 @AVindman]

Go go go!!!

[Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 @PollTracker2024]

Emerson/PollVault poll | 10/12-10/14

US House 2026 | Missouri’s 2nd congressional district

(Trump +8, Wagner +12 | 2024)

🟦Fred Wellman 51%
🟥Ann Wagner 46% (incumbent)