JD Vance on War and Peace

J.D. Vance is well known for his views on social policy and America’s culture wars, but on actual war and foreign policy, his positions receive much less attention. This is unfortunate because Vice Presidents have often played an important role as a close advisor to the President on foreign policy in particular (e.g., Dick Cheney and Joe Biden). So I spent the last couple of days examining Vance’s foreign policy statements and record.

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After poring over transcripts of his speeches to think tanks, his op-eds, and his social media posts, my sense is this: Vance is Trump with a cerebral cortex. Their positions are often quite similar but where Trump speaks in bombast, Vance uses a softer, more deliberate tone. This isn’t a judgment about his goodness or badness - there’s plenty of commentary about that already - but simply my attempt to factually characterize his views, which is my goal with this article.

With that in mind, here are Vance’s views on a number of key foreign policy issues.

NATO

There’s been a debate for years over how to get NATO member countries to contribute more of their gross national product to defense and the alliance, which the U.S. funds at a significantly higher rate than its European counterparts. While both Vance and Trump agree on this issue, the sharp differences in rhetoric is representative of the distinctions between the two.

In February, Trump said that he told an unnamed European leader that he would encourage Russia to do whatever the hell they want to any NATO countries that didn’t meet alliance spending goals. The blusterous remark drew predictable outrage, polarizing people on an issue about which many might otherwise be sympathetic. Why should Americans pay more than rich European countries for the defense of the continent?

Just one week after Trump’s remark, then-Senator Vance, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, addressed the same issue, but in diplomatic terms.

And I offer this in the spirit of friendship uh not in the spirit of criticism, because, no, I don't think that we should pull out of NATO; and no, I don't think that we should abandon Europe, Vance began. it’s because we have to recognize that we live in a world of scarcity.

He went on to advocate for essentially Trump’s position, but instead of simply blaming Europe, he added examples about the scarcity of U.S. munitions, and the need for the Europeans to shoulder more of the responsibility. He also offered some self-criticism of the U.S. role regarding the need to continue to bankroll Ukraine’s defense, saying that the West doesn’t make enough weapons, citing the the stupid Washington consensus that encouraged countries to deindustrialize.

The self-criticism appeared again in a keynote speech he delivered to the Quincy Institute in May:

But I actually think that Washington, at least current Washington leadership, really likes the fact that the Europeans are dependent on us. That’s not an alliance. These people aren’t increasingly allies [as some would characterize]. They are client states of the United States of America who do whatever we want them to do.

Vance’s argument is an interesting one because it shifts blame from faraway European governments to Washington, which Americans obviously have much more influence over. It also makes the case that this arrangement isn’t just bad for us; it’s bad for Europe, too, whose security has “atrophied” because of the U.S. “security blanket,” as Vance puts it.

Ukraine

While Vance can be more thoughtful than Trump, he also employs the former president’s shock jock tendencies when it’s useful.

“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance said in 2022 in the midst of his Senate campaign. The comment quickly went viral on X (then Twitter) provoking - as surely it was intended - pro-Ukraine supporters and the Washington foreign policy commentariat. DC egghead outrage is practically a free campaign ad for someone running in a rust belt state like Ohio, whose senate race Vance would go on to win.

These types of provocations strike me as insincere attempts by Vance to gin up publicity, copy pasted from Trump’s playbook. The tweet has since been deleted, suggesting remorse. Vance has since said that I certainly admire the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russia. Take a look at how differently Vance addresses the issue in this op-ed he wrote for The New York Times, titled “The Math in Ukraine Doesn’t Add Up”:

Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s defense minister estimated that the country’s base-line requirement for these shells was over four million per year but that it could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad

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A former Marine, Vance presumably has an understanding of the military, details of which he seems to lean on when articulating his argument against future military aid for Ukraine. His arguments are often quantitative: how many of which munitions the Ukrainians want, how many the U.S. can produce and how many America needs for other purposes. While Trump’s position on Ukraine is akin to Vance’s, trying to imagine Trump using that kind of argumentation is like trying to imagine my dog using watercolors. I’m not saying Vance is some kind of genius, but his willingness to engage in persuasive argument distinguishes him from Trump.

As Vance sees it, America lacks the defense industrial base necessary to supply Ukraine with sufficient arms to meaningfully drive out the Russians. He has also criticized what he calls the Biden administration’s lack of an endgame for the war. This kind of rhetoric echoes critiques of the war on terror, a war that both he and Trump have bitterly criticized.

For these reasons, Vance has called the Biden administration’s unwillingness to negotiate a settlement with Russian president Vladamir Putin “absurd,” saying that Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians.

China

The conventional news media casts Vance as an “isolationist,” a political tendency that opposes involvement in foreign affairs. The characterization seems less dishonest than lazy. Vance does advocate for reducing our involvement in both Europe and the Middle East, which presumably earned him the moniker. But he’s a fierce advocate for U.S. military engagement to check the rise of China.

In speech after speech, he argues that extricating ourselves from the Middle East is important not as an end in itself, but so that we can maintain a laser focus on China - a focus he says will last for nearly half a century.

The United States has to focus more on East Asia Vance said. That is going to be the future of American foreign policy for the next 40 years, and Europe has to wake up to that fact.

This position mirrors the dominant thinking in the U.S. military today. The need to reorient our focus toward China has been codified in the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy.

Vance also likes criticize the sorry state of the defense industrial base, which he blames on the orgy of offshoring of manufacturing carried out by the Washington and the foreign policy elite. He sees this as an even greater threat than China’s expanding foreign influence. As Vance puts it:

It's not that China is sort of expanding its scope into South America and to Africa as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, though again, I do think that should worry us. It's that China, based and because of the stupidity of Washington leaders over the past generation, is now arguably the most powerful industrial economy in the world. If we're going to lose a war, it will be because we have allowed our primary rival to become arguably our most powerful industrial competitor.

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Israel / Middle East

Another wrinkle in the “isolationist” label is Vance’s unqualified support for Israel, which he weirdly attributes to his Christian faith. How kind of the man upstairs to have blessed him with a position requisite to having a career in Republican politics.

Here’s what Vance told Quincy:

a big part of the reason why Americans care about Israel is because we are still the largest Christian-majority country in the world, which means that a majority of citizens of this country think that their savior, and I count myself a Christian, was born, died, and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory off the Mediterranean. The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn't care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous”

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Vance’s support for Israel does, however, differ from other Republicans’ in a couple of ways. For one, he stresses the need to explain why our support for Israel helps Americans.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if we're going to support Israel, as I think that we should, we have to articulate a reason why it's in our best interest, Vance says. He argues, again in pseudo military analysis, that Israel’s technical sophistication, particularly with regards to missile defense, makes it a partner that can build the type of defensive systems that could allow the U.S. to step back from the region, at least partially. As he told Quincy:

Israel is one of the most dynamic, certainly on a per capita basis, one of the most dynamic and technologically advanced countries in the world… And if you look at what Israel is doing just with the Iron Beam system, for example, this is a system that would allow America and our allies to actually achieve some parity with the people who are sending drones and rocket attacks and so forth.

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The idea that Israel and the West don’t have parity with Iranian-backed militias, or even Iran itself, on these matters is, in a word, ridiculous. It is also a common argument in Washington and another way in which Vance fails to depart from orthodoxy. Vance continues:

There is no way that we can long-term fight a missile defense battle against people if they're paying one-tenth or one-one-hundredth for offensive weapons that we are paying for defensive weapons, and the Israelis are doing the most important work to actually give us missile defense parity. That's a very important national security objective of the United States of America, and that's something we're working with one of the most innovative economies in the world to accomplish

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As a general proposition, that cheap drones and other munitions challenge the United States military to come up with cheaper defenses, not exactly the Pentagon’s strength, makes some sense. But it’s sort of irrelevant to the war in Gaza. And it displays the inability to tie one view (military withdrawal from the Middle East) with another (more defense spending to solve today’s limited problem in the Middle East), or more accurately in Ukraine where cheap drones have changed the face of a major war.

But Vance does still distinguish himself from other Republicans when he says he wants Israel to finish the war as quickly as possible, a statement that could have been made by any Democrat in America.

Yet for whatever Vance says, his views align closely with Trump’s, though again they are more developed. Vance also believes that the basic framework of the Abraham Accords - Trump’s signature foreign policy achievement that normalized relations between Israel and various Arab nations - should be expanded to more countries. This, he believes, would prevent conflict and provide a security architecture that would allow the U.S. to take a step back from the region and focus on China.

In some ways, Vance’s foreign policy vision feels wholly at home in Washington, obscure and technical arguments to explain (and resolve) big intractable problems. Maybe Vance could serve as Trump’s top national security advisor, or at least the flame that the moths in Washington will gather around. But in terms of the new Vance, the one that forgets his criticism of Trump in order to get on the ticket (and to get his ticket on the way to be president someday), it’s still unclear whether he will ultimately have any influence.