The World According to J.D. Vance

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — “For 40 years, this country has made, largely, I would say, a bipartisan mistake. It has allowed our manufacturing might to get offshored and to get outsourced, while simultaneously increasing the commitments that we have all over the world. We basically outsourced our ability to manufacture critical weapons while stepping up our responsibilities to police the world. And, of course, if we are going to police the world, then it is American troops who need those weapons. With one hand, we have weakened our own country; with the other, we have overextended.” 

That was Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) speaking on the Senate floor on April 23, 2024, in opposition to the foreign aid bill that provided $61 billion in weapons and economic aid to Ukraine, $26 billion to Israel and $8 billion to Taiwan.  

It was the Ukraine money that Vance opposed, but his long speech that night, and other talks and interviews he has given – most before being named Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate last week – are worth studying, for they show a rather different, though unformed and to an extent ill-informed, view of traditional and primarily bipartisan U.S. national security policy. 

Vance often references a decision made two decades ago – as he did last April on the Senate floor – saying, “I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy, that those who were appeasing Saddam Hussein were inviting a broader regional conflict.” 

It was then, just out of high school, that Vance joined the Marine Corps and after basic training served through 2007 working in public affairs, speaking and writing about Marines for hometown papers. For six months in late 2005 he was sent to Iraq, where he says that “as a public affairs Marine, I would attach to different units to get a sense of their daily routine. Sometimes I’d escort civilian press, but generally I’d take photos or write short stories about individual Marines or their work,” Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. 

Back on the Senate floor last April, Vance said of his time as a Marine, “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.” 

He then added, “What I’m saying is not that the people of Iraq were bad…what I’m saying is the [U.S.] obsessive focus on moralism: ‘democracy is good, Saddam Hussein is bad, America good, tyranny bad’ – that that is no way to run a foreign policy.”  

He then went on to compare the case for the Iraq war to U.S. support for Ukraine, saying, “Does that sound familiar to anything that we are hearing today? It is the same exact talking points, 20 years later, with different names. But have we learned anything over the last 20 years? No, I don’t think that we have.” 

For some reason Vance appears to believe, as he put it last April, “We [U.S. leadership] learned that if we talk incessantly about World War II, we can bully people and cause them to ignore their basic moral impulses and lead the country straight into catastrophic conflict.” 

Earlier on the Senate floor, Vance had said, “We need to be able to understand history as not just World War II replaying itself over and over and over again. Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. It doesn’t mean he is a good guy, but he has significantly less capability than the German leader did in the late 1930s. America is not the America of the late 1930s or the early 1940s. We possess substantially less manufacturing might, in relative terms, than we did almost 100 years ago.” 

Vance’s last statement showed his lack of knowledge about the 1940s. Pre-World War II, the U.S. was totally unprepared for fighting a two-front war in Europe and the Pacific. But the country, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, responded to the threat of dictatorships abroad even before the Pearl Harbor attack of Dec.7, 1941. The U.S. began building a major military force in 1940 via the draft, and from that year, the nation doubled industrial military output so that in the end the U.S. supplied two-thirds of allied military equipment. 

Vance on Ukraine 

At the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 18, 2024, Vance took an unusual position he has repeated several times since. 

He said, “The limiting factors for American support of Ukraine, it’s not money, it’s munitions. America…and Europe too, we don’t make enough munitions to support a war in Eastern Europe, a war in the Middle East, and potentially a contingency in East Asia. So the United States is fundamentally limited.” 

By way of example, Vance said, “We’re talking in the United States about ramping up our production of artillery to 100,000 a month by the end of 2025. The Russians make close to 500,000 a month right now at this very minute. So the problem here vis-à-vis Ukraine is America doesn’t make enough weapons; Europe doesn’t make enough weapons; and that reality is far more important than American political will or how much money we print and then send to Europe.” 

Let me first point out that according to NATO intelligence estimates released on Mar 11, 2024, Russia is producing about 250,000 artillery munitions per month, not 500,000. And once the Ukraine aid bill passed that Vance opposed, the U.S. now expects to reach 100,000 155-mm shells by the summer of 2025, six months ahead of Vance’s prediction.  

But underpinning Vance’s position, as he stated in Munich, is his view that “I do not think that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe and to the extent that he is, again, that suggests that Europe has to take a more aggressive role in its own security.” 

He added, “My argument is, look, I think what’s reasonable to accomplish is some negotiated peace. I think Russia has incentive to come to the table right now.” 

That was Vance’s view five months ago. Putin has not shown any interest in negotiations since, nor has Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. And they are the ones who will determine when talks take place. 

The rest of the world 

Looking at other corners of the globe, Vance has said that China is the main threat to the U.S. 

In an April 28, 2024 Fox News interview he said, “You have to ask yourself, is China going to be more dissuaded by us thumping our chests and acting tough in Europe, or are they going to be more dissuaded by us having the weapons necessary to prevent them from invading Taiwan?” 

He continued, “My argument is the Chinese are focused on real power. They’re not focused on how tough people talk on TV or how strong our alleged resolve is. They’re focused on how strong we actually are, and to be strong enough to push back against the Chinese, we’ve got to focus there, and right now, we’re stretched too thin.” 

Of course as the Taiwanese themselves are quick to point out, if the U.S. ends its support for Ukraine, it would embolden Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

In a CNN interview on May 12, 2024, Vance gave his views on Israel and the Gaza war. He called the Biden administration policy “incoherent,” because “they’re saying too many Palestinian civilians have been killed. With the other hand, they’re depriving the Israelis of the precision-guided weapons that actually cut down on civilian casualties.” 

However, the Biden administration has continued to provide munitions support to Israel, including $700 million for Glide Bomb Assemblies, a type of precision bomb kit. 

More important, Vance also said, “I think that our attitude vis-a-vis the Israelis should be, Look, we’re not good at micromanaging Middle Eastern wars, the Israelis are our allies, let them prosecute this war the way they see fit …” 

One oddity in Vance’s rather isolationist worldview came up during that long Senate floor speech back in April.  

At one point, while discussing Iraq, he veered off and said, “Here is another thing that we should learn from the Iraq war, something that I as a Christian care a lot about and I think that even many of my colleagues who are not Christians, many of my fellow Americans who are not Christians, should care about. The United States remains, to this day, the world’s largest majority Christian nation. We are the largest Christian nation by population in the entire world. And yet what are the fruits? – ‘By your fruits ye shall know them,’ the Bible tells us. What are the fruits of American foreign policy when it comes to Christian populations all over the world over the last few decades?” 

Vance then said that there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq before the U.S. invaded – “Chaldeans,” he said, “people who trace their lineage and their ancestors to people who knew the literal Apostles of Jesus Christ.” 

He added, “Now, nearly every single one of those historical Christian communities is gone. That is the fruits of American labor in Iraq—a regional ally of Iran and the eradication and decimation of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.” 

Vance then spoke of a proposed law in Ukraine that could ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Ukraine, as a religious organization associated with Russia that supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

On the Senate floor Vance said, “I believe, standing here, that this war will eventually lead to the displacement of a massive Christian community in Ukraine. And that will be our shame – our shame in this Chamber for not seeing it coming; our shame in this Chamber for doing nothing to stop it; our shame for refusing to use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to Ukraine as leverage to ensure and guarantee real religious freedom.” 

At the end of his speech at the Republican convention last Thursday, Vance made some brief but interesting references to his national security views. 

No surprise he said, “Together, we will make sure our allies share in the burden of securing world peace. No more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer.” 

He added, “Together, we will send our kids to war only when we must. But as President Trump showed with the elimination of ISIS and so much more, when we punch, we’re going to punch hard.” Forget, of course, that ISIS still exists in Syria along with American troops who were sent originally by then-President Trump to secure oil fields. 

It was Vance’s closing thought that was most intriguing: “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” 

Freedom and democracy are abstractions, and leaders of this country, whether Republicans or Democrats, have long believed that the United States, as leader of the free world, has some responsibility to help protect such abstractions, not only at home but around the world. 

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. 

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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