Daniel Larison: What Will Vance Do for Trump’s Foreign Policy?

By Daniel Larison, Responsible Statesmanship, 7/15/24

Donald Trump announced earlier today that he had selected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. Just two days after the former president’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump’s selection elevated the young first-term senator to the Republican national ticket as the party’s national convention got underway in Milwaukee. In choosing Vance, Trump appears to have ignored pressure from Rupert Murdoch, who reportedly lobbied heavily for North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and against Vance. Trump has chosen a loyalist who will appeal to his core supporters in the party’s populist wing.

While the selection makes sense in terms of the senator’s political ties to Trump, it’s somewhat unconventional given Vance’s limited government experience. Vance will be the youngest vice presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1952. He has only been in elected office for a year and a half. Vance is likely to face plenty of questions about his readiness to serve as president if called upon.

Trump’s selection is likely to prove controversial. Vance has become something of a lightning rod for criticism in Washington, especially since entering the Senate. He first rose to national prominence as an author and critic of Trump’s candidacy in 2016, but he has transformed himself in recent years into an outspoken defender of the former president. He has aligned himself closely with Trump’s agenda and has become a leading critic of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy.

Vance went to the Munich Security Conference earlier this year to press his case against military aid to Ukraine. If a Trump-Vance ticket wins, it’s conceivable that the U.S. could cut or halt aid to Ukraine next year. That said, his skepticism about U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts doesn’t seem to extend beyond Ukraine.

Like Trump, Vance also has some very aggressive foreign policy positions. He has attacked Biden for “micromanaging” Israel’s war in Gaza, and he agrees with Trump that the Israeli government needs to “finish the job.” He has taken a strikingly hardline stance on the war and American support for it. He has said, “Don’t use America’s leverage to effectively get the Israelis to pull out.”

As Reason’s Matthew Petti reported this spring, Vance has been a sharp critic of neoconservative policies in the Middle East, but “he’s doubling down on the vision they’ve had all along: an alliance of Israel and Sunni Muslim-led states, backed by American military power, to ‘police’ the region.” The U.S. will have a hard time reducing its entanglements in the Middle East if it continues Israel’s devastating military campaigns. It’s impossible to see how involving the U.S. in its clients’ war crimes serves American interests or makes Americans safer.

As we have seen over the past nine months, supporting a client’s horrific war does not free up American resources or keep American troops out of harm’s way. On the contrary, it places targets on the backs of our soldiers and sailors and entangles the United States in more unnecessary conflicts with other regional actors. Far from shifting the burden to clients, this approach has imposed new costs on the United States.

Vance’s hawkishness extends to East Asia as well. He has framed his opposition to aid to Ukraine largely in terms of the need to focus U.S. resources on containing China, and he criticizes Biden for not doing enough on this front. Vance’s position implies that he believes the U.S. needs to significantly increase its arms shipments to partners and expand its military presence in the region. To the extent that U.S. policy in East Asia relies too heavily on a “military-first” approach, it risks making matters worse.

The senator has also expressed support for military action against drug cartels in Mexico. In a 2023 interview, he said, “I want to give the president of the United States, whether he’s a Democrat or a Republican, the power to use the power of the United States military to take on these drug cartels.” That’s a popular idea in the Republican Party in recent years, but it would be bad policy for both the U.S. and Mexico. As Christopher Fettweis explained in Responsible Statecraft last year, “any military operation would almost certainly fail to destroy the cartels” and “would not stop the flow of drugs into the United States.” Vance should know from his own military service in Iraq that the U.S. should not send its troops on impossible, open-ended missions.

Vance’s foreign policy record is not long, but it does contain a number of warning signs that the American people should heed.