WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Michael Lucchese: What ‘Peace Through Strength’ Really Means

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Michael Lucchese, founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence, joins WRFH his recent essay at the Washington Examiner, "What ‘peace through strength’ really means."From 10/07/25.

Hello and welcome. You're listening to WRFH Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Malia Tibido here today with Michael Lucasey, a Hillsdale alum and founder of CEO of Pipe Creek Consulting. Hi Michael. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah. So first of all, can you tell us a little bit about yourself what you've been doing since your time at Hillsdale? Yeah, so I graduated from Hillsdale in 2018. I was an American Studies major and a journalism minor. I worked on the radio station when I was a student. So this is a fun homecoming for me. After I graduated, I went to work for Senator Ben Sass from Nebraska for five years until he resigned from the Senate. And I helped him write national security speeches and some other stuff.

And then after his resignation, I started my communications consulting companies. So now I am a writer and a communications consultant based in Washington, D.C. Yeah. How would you say your experience at Hillsdale has affected your career? I think the education I received at Hillsdale was second to none. And I'm incredibly grateful for it. I think of professors like Miles Smith and Brad Burser, Paul Ray, who really influenced my life and shaped the way that I think. And I also am very grateful to Hillsdale because that was where I first met the work

of a Russell Kirk, who is a professor at Hillsdale, the writer of the conservative mind. And he really shaped how I think about conservatism, not just in a broad philosophical sense, but also when it comes to questions of national security and international competition. Right. Those professors like Bursar and them are still icons on campus today. So you recently published an article for the Washington Examiner about how Trump is achieving his peace through strength agenda on the Russia's Ukraine war front. Could you give a brief summary of what you were talking about? Yeah, for sure. So I think a lot of people sort of expected Trump based on his doveish rhetoric while it is in the political wilderness to sort of withdraw all support from Ukraine.

And especially with that moment between J.D. Vance and President Zelensky in the Oval Office, there was a lot of doubt about where Trump stood on Ukraine. Would he abandon our friends? What would he do? And now suddenly, that's all changing. He's selling arms. He's calling out Putin in a very public way. The United States is considering giving certain targeting intelligence to the Ukrainian so that he could hit targets within Russia itself. And so suddenly there's this new hawkish turn in Trump's form policy. And a lot of people in D.C., both people on the more restrainer side and people on the more liberal or nationalist side are totally stunned by this. And I don't know if this is a permanent turn or if it will continue to shape policy.

You know, things are very unpredictable with Donald Trump. So who knows? But in terms of what he's actually doing, my argument in the piece is that this is a peace through strength policy. And the reason he's pursuing it is because it's what his voters expect. And I take a look at some recent polling from the Vandenberg Coalition. And I argue that the MAGA base, the really conservative voters, they're not these isolationist types that a lot of people in the media make them out to be. They really want American leadership. And that's what they expect from a conservative president. You mentioned like the moment between Vance and Zelensky. Do you think that

moment, the type of foreign policy that it represented. Do you think that was a mistake on behalf of Trump? Yeah. So I certainly have no sympathy for the isolationist camp in the Trump administration. I think that, and I make this argument in the piece, I think they're kind of declineists, right? The president who they remind me a lot of is actually Jimmy Carter, right? They sort of are of the opinion that America is an empire in decline, that we have to pull back our resources and sort of huddle up into Fortress America, only focusing on Western Hemisphere. And I certainly agree that the security in the Western Hemisphere, the war on drugs, these are important things, but it's not the only thing going on in the world, right? And so in terms of the actual administration,

I think there are a few different camps when it comes to foreign policy. And for a while, especially when J.D. Vance confronted Zelensky in the Oval Office. It seemed that the restrainer isolationist camp, Elbridge Colby is another example of this kind of person in the administration. It seemed like they were sort of in the lead. But in the last six months or so, especially since the war between Israel and Iran broke out and Trump chose to go forward with Operation Midnight Hammer and take out the Iranian nuclear sites, it seems to me that the restrainer camp is, sort of on the back foot right now. And I'm very happy about that. And I think most Republican voters are probably pretty happy about that too. In your article, you say, quote, returning to the White

House has taught him Trump that ending the war in Ukraine will take longer than the days or months he promised it would during the election. What do you think was Trump's view of the war before he got back in office? And how has that changed since? Yeah. So obviously, I, I, I think that we can blame a lot of the war. I think Trump has right to do this on President Biden's weakness, especially after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. There was just like a sort of general sense of weakness on the part of the Biden administration, in part because like the restrainer in Trump's camp now, they wanted to pull back resources from the front lines of conflict with Russia, China, and Iran. And so Trump is right, I think, to criticize this, but he sort of thought,

I think going in that he had the magic touch, that he would be able to just get Zelensky and Putin to sit down at a table across from each other and work out a deal. That obviously has not worked. And it's even the case that Putin has ramped up his targeting of civilians in Ukraine. Some of the stuff, some of the news coming out of Ukraine is really, really horrific, stuff that we haven't seen since the opening days of the war and the war crimes that Putin's invading force committed. And so I think Putin's entranced against his, his aggression. I think these are things that Trump, at least publicly, did not really reckon with when he was in the political wilderness. And now that he's back in the White House,

I think he's sort of realizing that Putin maybe isn't the kind of person you can make a deal with. And certainly not, you cannot negotiate with Putin from a position of strength or reluctance, right? You need to be able to come to that negotiating table. And I think Trump is starting to understand this from a position of strength. And you need to be able to, you need to be able to dictate terms. And that's what I hope this turn in the Ukraine policy will bring about. You're listening to WRFH Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Malia Tippettow with Michael Lou Casey. I want to go back to Trump's first term in office. He was widely criticized for his perceived friendliness with Putin. How do you think that affected how Trump thought that he could negotiate this?

piece. To be sure. And I think that a lot of that criticism was well-founded, actually. I think that this is a trap that a lot of American presidents fall into, right? So going back to the days after 9-11 during the height of the global war on terror, you know, President George W. Bush, a man I admire very greatly, he thought that he could, the phrase that he used was look into Putin's eyes and see his soul. And, you know, he took him to his ranch in Texas and sort of drove around with him in a pickup truck. And so a lot of American presidents, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again, they sort of think that Putin is the kind of person they can work with, that he is, you know, represents a new Russia or that somehow when a new American president comes around,

Putin wants to press the big red button and reset relations, as Hillary Clinton did with Sergey Lavrov back in the 2010s. But that's totally mistaken, right? I think the fundamental thing that we have to understand about Vladimir Putin is that he was a KGB agent, right? He grows up at the height of the Soviet Union's power. And then he considers the Soviet Union's collapse to be the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. That's his phrase. And so I think that we need to really focus in on who Vladimir Putin is and what he's trying to promote. I think a lot of American commentators don't reckon with the ideological dimension of Putin's war in Ukraine. I certainly think that Donald Trump doesn't think about that as much. And so it leads to a position where Americans are very

easily manipulated by the Russians. What I'm grateful for now, though, is that it seems at least at the moment that there's a kind of turning point that Trump is realizing that that, again, Putin is not somebody that he can work with. And therefore, he's standing pretty firmly with our NATO and Ukrainian allies. Yeah. On the flip side with Ukraine, Trump had not had the best experience with that, obviously with like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the widely known about corruption within Ukraine. Do you think that influenced how he dealt with Ukraine? Absolutely. And I think the other thing here is that a lot of conservatives don't don't really think, think through this issue this way. But I think

that the Ukrainians made a calculation at the outset of Putin's invasion in 2022. They said there is a Democrat in charge, Biden, and he has already shown a reluctance to support United States allies in global conflict. So, you know, Afghanistan being the most recent example of that, just taking place, the retreat taking place a mere matter of months before the invasion of Ukraine began. And so they made a calculation that we're going to get a media operation in the United States that will target Democrats specifically, and that will try to keep the Democrats on board with the war effort. And that makes a lot of sense when there's a Democrat president. But when there's a new president, and he's of a different party, you have to sort of recalculate

your strategy. And so in recent in recent months, I think, especially after the Oval Office meltdown, the Ukrainians have really reassessed how do we talk to people in Washington, D.C., how can we present a sort of more bipartisan face to our cause? And they've been widely successful in that. Keith Kellogg, of course, has been spending a lot of time in Ukraine. And I think that they've really demonstrated to him their battlefield prowess and have impressed him by that. I think that, You know, they did little things like Zelensky wore a suit the last time that he met with Donald Trump, which he, of course, was criticized for in right wing media here in the United States. And so I think that they're really sort of, the Ukrainians are really sort of trying to talk to the Americans in a different way. And I think that they're seeing the results are very successful for them, so far at least. Right. Now, of course, we have to always say this is this is all provisional. We don't know what's going to happen. month from now and Donald Trump is mercurial. So who knows. But at least for now, things I think are trending in the right direction for the Ukrainians. Yeah. Going back to the messaging targeted to

the Democrats, I know there was a lot of pushback in conservative media when President Trump visited Pennsylvania and signed a few things with, or not signed a few things, but had a lot of public communication with Governor Josh Shapiro. Do you think that there was some validity to the conservative concerns about how it seemed he was trying to pander to the Democrats there? Look, Ukraine's not a perfect country. And I don't think that even Ukrainians feel that way, right? Ukrainian politics is in some ways even more rough and tumble than American politics. But I do think that if you look at poll data, there's this sort of notion that the parties have swapped on Russia and that now the Democrats are the anti-Russia party and the Republicans are the pro-Russia party.

But I cite polling from the Van derbyr coalition in my piece in the examiner. And the Van derbynberg coalition, they've been tracking the Trump base, the voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election. They've been tracking their views about foreign policy over the last few months. And what they've found consistently is that Trump voters support American leadership. They want Donald Trump to actually show that kind of Reaganite peace through strength mentality. Right. And that doesn't just mean they want increases to military spending or something like that, although that would probably be a good thing.

It also means that they believe in strong alliances, right? And there's this sort of latent wisdom, I think. think, you know, voters rarely say that foreign policy issues are their number one voting issue, right? But I do think that voters understand that a safe America means a strong America, and a strong America means that our allies have to be strong. And our allies include Ukraine. I think that Vladimir Putin, his approval rating here in the United States is, of course, dismal because he has a tyrant and the American people hate tyrants. But also Republicans, I don't think, want to see a strong Russia. And they don't want to see an ally that we've invested incredible

amounts in to be overrun by one of our great geopolitical rivals. So I think that while we might legitimately criticize the Ukrainians for some of their media strategy, I think that overall the American people are still very much on the side of Zelensky and Ukraine and against Vladimir Putin. And that's true, whether we're talking about Democrats or Republicans. If you're just tuning in, this is WRFH Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Malia Thibito here with Michael Lou Casey, a Hillsdale grad, and a professional editor for publications like Law and Liberty and Providence. When you wrote about how the U.S. needs to negotiate from a place of strength,

what does that consist of? Yeah, so I'm not a battlefifference. expert or anything like that. But I think that we need to put Putin on the back foot. We need to make it clear to him that Ukraine is not Russian territory and will never be Russian territory. So I think there are a few basic steps there. So first of all, Trump himself said recently that he might even be in favor of Ukraine taking back Crimea, which of course the country lost in the first 2014 invasion. So I think battlefield success is a really important thing here. And I think the United States should support Ukraine. I'm not saying, obviously, don't put American boots on the

ground. I don't even think we need American planes to start a no-fly zone or anything like that. But the first thing is give Ukrainians the support that they need in order to have actual battlefield success and turn the tide of the invasion. So that's that's the first thing. The second thing is, I think we need to strengthen NATO and the European Union. And I think we need to shift the center of power away from Paris and Berlin and toward Warsaw and Kiev. So, you know, our allies in the Baltic states, our allies in Poland, they understand the threat that Russia poses and they are uncompromising about it, whether we're talking about neoliberal parties or populist parties. Everybody in Eastern Europe understands that Russia poses an existential threat to their security.

And I think that we need to support those states. So one of Trump's hobby horses, of course, has been defense spending. And I think he's right to worry that our allies are not spending enough on defense. But these Eastern European countries are, in fact, right? Poland, their defense spending has skyrocketed. Same thing goes for the Baltic states, Finland, of course. And so strengthening NATO's eastern flank is, I think, a really important step here. And that involves both our allies stepping up resources, but also the United States stepping up

resources. Trump has expressed interest in stationing troops and missiles in Poland. I think we should continue to pursue that. And third, I think we need to think about the way in which our conflict, with Russia is not just one isolated event. It is a front in what is shaping up to be a global war against revisionist powers, right? There is an alliance between Iran, Russia, and China that seeks to roll back the American-led global order. And I think we need to think about the war in Ukraine in those terms. It is a front in this global war against revisionism. And we have to understand

that what happens in Ukraine will affect what happens in the Middle East will affect what happens in the Asia Pacific, and that meets via mentality going forward. So in my understanding, the argument for retrenchment is that the U.S. need not be involved with like these European or global wars and should instead refocus more on strengthening its domestic front. From what you've said in your article and in this interview, I think you're against them, but how would you say we should keep our allies accountable and balance a good relationship with them? And how long and how heavy do you think this commitment needs to be? Yeah. So to be sure, I don't think that the American foreign policy's goal should be to

revolutionize the world or anything like that. I don't think our goal should be to set out to make the rest of the world look exactly like America or something. Not only is that impractical, it's probably morally wrong on some level. But what I do think we can do is preserve a global order that has benefited Americans since the end of World War II. And I think what we have to understand is there are ideological threats to that global order represented by the ideologies of the regimes in Russia and Iran and China. All three regimes, frankly, have their roots in Marxism. The Cold War has not ended. And those regimes want to hurt Americans, hurt our allies, and hurt our interests. So I think we need a foreign policy that will really, first of all,

shore up those alliances and make sure that we are empowering our allies, whether we're talking about Ukraine or Israel or Taiwan or other nations, Japan, right, a foreign policy that will shore them up and enable them to defend their security and interests, first of all. But second of all, I think we need to be able to project power around the world, right? I think there's this notion that things are getting so technologically advanced that we can just sort of press a button and a drone will take some terrorist or some ne'er-do-well out and we won't even have to risk American lives or anything like that. But the problem with that is it's just a fantasy.

I think a lot about the 9-11 Commission Report. 9-11 was really the greatest foreign policy failure of modern American history. It was a preventable attack. We could have dealt with the threat of al-Qaeda starting as early as the 1990s. And yet, to quote from the end of the 9-11 Commission report, they argued that the terrorists were in some ways more globalized than America, because they were thinking about how to strike America and America wasn't even thinking about how to strike them. So, well, I think it might be easy to say, oh, we need to pull back from from the world and we need to focus on our domestic problems.

The world is not losing its interest in America, even if America loses her interest in the world. And so it seems to me that that tradeoff isn't even really a tradeoff. There will always be threats and we will always have to project power against those threats. And I'm not entirely sure how retrenchment will even help the domestic situation terribly, right? That seems like a problem for Congress to figure out not the United States military or national security apparatus. Yeah, thank you for joining us. I've been, only a tibodeau with guest Michael Lou Casey on WRFH, Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.