JD Vance’s foreign policy has nothing to do with restraint

What kind of foreign policy can we expect from JD Vance? The Ohio senator’s selection as Donald Trump’s running mate has been celebrated by American First and “Restrainer” groups, even as it has panicked liberal internationalists and supporters of the trans-Atlantic community.

To ask, “What does JD Vance believe” is to make a category error. The better question is, “What beliefs will JD Vance espouse in order to draw closer to power?”

Since Vance abandoned his “Never Trump” posture after 2017, he has taken every opportunity to endear himself to Trump and even to offer a kind of intellectual scaffolding for MAGA foreign policy. There is little reason to believe that Vance would provide a meaningful voice for restraint (on any issue other than Ukraine) in a Trump White House, or that he is interested in a long-term revision of U.S. foreign policy priorities. 

But Vance’s principled commitment to “restraint” is mostly wishful thinking among a set of pundits seeking political relevance.

Like the vast bulk of his Republican brethren, Vance is a strong supporter of Israel and of Israel’s war in Gaza. He has argued that the United States has a critical role in establishing a balancing coalition against Iran in the Middle East. Vance has consistently supported a hard line against Iran, having expressed outright admiration for Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and has even described his late-found opposition to the Iraq War in terms of Iran’s growing regional influence. Vance has expressed few, if any, qualms about the size of the defense budget or the influence of the defense industrial base on American politics. 

Closer to home, Vance is an enthusiastic supporter of the notion that the U.S. military should play an active role in the war on drugs, up to and including direct military intervention in Mexico. Vance has positioned himself as a China hawk, and in the past has argued for a security commitment to Taiwan that feels much more like President Joe Biden’s foreign policy than Trump’s. Vance would likely abandon that commitment for tactical reasons — Trump has suggested that the U.S. relationship with Taiwan should be transactional rather than categorical — but this simply serves to illustrate Vance’s ideological flexibility. 

Vance has displayed the kind of skepticism of the national security state that is now common in MAGA circles, but this has less to do with any principled non-interventionism than it does with concern that career national security bureaucrats are unenthusiastic about Trump. Given Vance’s enthusiasm for prosecuting the domestic components of the “deep state,” it seems possible that one of his early tasks in a second Trump administration would be to discipline the intelligence community and force it into conformity with Trump’s foreign policy perspective.

But some of his commitments seem genuine. He seems genuinely impressed by Viktor Orbán, and he seems interested in doing business with Putin, a vision of great-power relations that is fundamentally transactional rather than ideological. Indeed, Vance seems particularly animated by hostility towards U.S. support for Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia. Vance is evidently unburdened by the need to make his claims about Ukraine accord with objective reality, and has repeatedly claimed that the war represents a dire threat of escalation and a significant burden on the American economy.

The influence of Silicon Valley money seems apparent on this question; Vance is a favorite of Silicon Valley conservatives such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks; Sacks in particular has demonstrated extraordinary hostility towards Ukrainian aspirations. Much of this rather peculiar ideological commitment seems to have something to do with the perceived “anti-wokeness” of the Russian regime, which is also a value that Vance has embraced. 

JD Vance is a political chameleon. He has rapidly built an impressive career in American politics, earning notoriety and acclaim from his book, support from tech overlords such as Thiel and Sacks, and now the acceptance of the MAGA world. But no one, including his patrons and his co-ideologists, should make the mistake of trusting him.

Vance is flexible, which is a polite way of saying that he is full of it. In pursuit of power he is happy to lie about his people, his past, his principles and his ideology. Thiel and Sacks and the Quincy Institute may come to regret the faith that they have invested in him. Realists and restrainers may discover that they have abandoned Ukraine only to invade Mexico.

Robert Farley is a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky.