The Speech
The setting was the Republican National Convention’s national security night in Milwaukee, July 2024, themed Make America Strong Again. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Donald Trump’s freshly announced running mate, delivered the keynote, accepted the party’s vice presidential nomination, and praised the man at the top of the ticket. “President Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what, if lost, may never be found again,” he said. The technical detail that matters from the text: extensive remarks on the threat of China, and no mention at all of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the war in Gaza. The 39-year-old, a venture capitalist turned politician and a former Marine who served in Iraq, brought barely two years in office and a thin foreign policy record to the ticket.
The Worldview Under the Hood
Vance’s positioning, as VOA’s Patsy Widakuswara profiled it, runs pro-Israel, anti-China, and to European ears, alarming. He doubts the case for sending American forces overseas and, apart from Israel, resists foreign aid on principle. His argument is arithmetic as much as ideology: Washington cannot back Ukraine, hold the Middle East, and stay ready for East Asian contingencies at once. “The math doesn’t work out in terms of weapons manufacturing.” he said at the Munich Security Conference in February.
Analysts push back on the isolationist label. Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center calls him a realist, or perhaps a prioritizer, and at the Quincy Institute he laid out the allocation scheme plainly: “We want the Israelis and the Sunnis to police their own region of the world. We want the Europeans to police their own region of the world, and we want to be able to focus more on East Asia,” he said. As ever, the idea has a pedigree: Barack Obama pursued a Pivot to Asia from 2009 to 2017, and it never quite arrived, bogged down by conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.
Ukraine and Israel
On Ukraine, Vance matches Trump’s push to cut support and shift the burden to Europeans. “I do not think that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe,” he said in Munich, a line that rippled through diplomatic circles, adding that Kyiv should seek a “negotiated peace” even at the cost of territory. Former ambassador John Herbst judged him completely naive about Putin’s Russia, though Herbst found optimism in Trump’s aversion to being tagged with a foreign policy failure.
Israel is the exception in the ledger. Citing his Christian beliefs, Vance backs continued military aid and opposes limits on Israel’s war conduct, a stance analysts tie to evangelical influence in the party even as he derides the neoconservative project as strategically and morally stupid.
China and Taiwan
The China file is where Vance is most pointed. The Hillbilly Elegy author, shaped by deindustrialization, told the convention his community paid the price: “Joe Biden screwed up, and my community paid the price.” In the Senate he pushed bills to wall off U.S. financial markets from China and to guard American universities against Beijing’s influence. On Taiwan the stance is sharper than Trump’s: “the thing that we need to prevent more than anything is a Chinese invasion,” he said at the Heritage Foundation, warning of economic catastrophe. Trump, by contrast, mused to Bloomberg Businessweek that “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company,” complaining Taipei pays nothing for its defense.
