German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, known for his sardonic quips, famously remarked that the United States is buffered by weak neighbors to the north and south and by fish to the east and west.
Though Bismarck sought to highlight America’s latent geographic advantages, its remoteness brings another blessing that has become emblematic of post-Cold War U.S. domestic politics: the U.S. has the power and resources to shape the international system, but is simultaneously detached from it in ways that its Old World counterparts cannot afford to be.
There has thus been a striking contrast between America’s historically unprecedented ability to influence the world and the sheer lack of foreign policy substance in its public discourse. That is, until now.
Former President Donald Trump’s decision to name Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate bucked two well-established trends: vice presidential picks being inconsequential, and foreign policy being a non-factor in American domestic politics.
The pick set off a political firestorm unlike any vice presidential announcement in recent memory, with much of it centered on Vance’s foreign policy views. Vance’s detractors have gone over his positions with a fine-tooth comb, grasping for convenient labels. Within less than one day of the announcement, Vance was described as everything from an “arch-isolationist” who spells the end of Reaganism to a “hawk” on virtually every issue except for the Ukraine war.
Yet this piecemeal approach to understanding Vance and his significance on the GOP ticket misses a larger and much more important context. It is true that Vance has made Ukraine something of a signature foreign policy issue, emerging as one of the most forceful Senate critics of a Western Ukraine policy that has not yielded the results anticipated by its architects in the White House. But Vance’s views on the Ukraine conflict, compelling and well-formulated as they are, underlie a deeper set of convictions that reflects the changing face of American politics.
On the level of party dynamics, Vance’s selection marks nothing less than a stunning rebuke of a tired, fading foreign policy consensus that is increasingly divorced from the challenges confronting the U.S. It is as strong a signal as any that Trump, if victorious in November, will likely seek to bring the Ukraine war to a swift conclusion as one of his first policy items. It’s also possible, depending on a wide array of domestic and external factors that are difficult to predict, that with influence from Vance and others, Trump could pursue a broader re-posturing away from reflexive interventionism and needless foreign entanglements.
It is in this light that Vance’s defiant stance on Ukraine poses a means to a much larger grand strategic goal. He believes, as does a large share of the American people and, at least to some degree, the man at the top of the GOP ticket, that the nature of the trans-Atlantic relationship needs to change in order for the U.S. to find a strategically sustainable footing in an era of renewed great power competition.
There is little question that the Ukraine war and the West’s reaction to it has weakened Europe, hobbling its economic dynamism and rendering it increasingly dependent on the United States. To a new generation of realist foreign policy thinkers, this dependence should not be celebrated as a form of “unity” but is, instead, a liability that further exacerbates a longstanding pattern of U.S. overcommitment in Europe.
Vance has championed the view that Europe should stand on its own two feet militarily and do more to provide for its own defense. This argument, which is resonant with a new style of populist politics that has radically transformed the GOP over the past decade, cuts past the usual talking points around the need for greater “burden sharing” to the more fundamental realization that America’s post-Cold War alliance structures need to be updated to better reflect the challenges that the U.S. faces today.
This is not an argument for abandoning Europe or leaving NATO, which is something that no prominent figure in the realism and restraint coalition supports, but to strive for a transatlantic relationship that is characterized by partnership over what has increasingly been a kind of one-sided dependence. None of this is possible while Europe is roiled by the most destructive war on its continent since 1945, which explains the urgency with which Vance and others representing the new populist face of the GOP seek to bring a negotiated end to the Ukraine war as it enters its third year.
On a broader level, Vance’s political ascendance represents a generational passing of the torch to a new wave of politicians who have taken up the difficult task of reimagining America’s place in the world after decades of policy decisions steeped in a hubristic, ill-conceived drive to preserve the waning post-Cold War unipolar moment during which the U.S. was able to act virtually unchallenged on the world stage. These leaders, who defy the established left-right political spectrum, are drawing national attention to the fact that America’s balance sheet of resources and commitments has been unsustainable for years. They perceive the link between overcommitment abroad and decline at home and seek to find ways to end this ruinous cycle.
The debate over means and ends in foreign policy has long been a sideshow in the overarching drama of American politics, relegated to small expert circles in the academic and think tank worlds. But even a great power as strongly advantaged as the U.S. was in the 1990s and early 2000s can only stretch itself so much, and for so long, before retrenchment becomes unavoidable.
The global challenges confronting America have reached a critical mass; a veil of normalcy and “business as usual,” underwritten for decades by America’s massive comparative advantages and the absence of peer competitors, has been abruptly lifted with simultaneous crises in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Trump’s VP decision was presaged by an unprecedented explosion of public interest in foreign policy among concerned voters from all across the country. In a longue durée view of American history, Vance’s selection may very well turn out to be a watershed moment for the democratization of U.S. foreign policy. After decades of benign complacency, American voters have concluded that foreign policy is too important to be left to the technocrats and special interest groups. Whatever comes next, a Rubicon has been crossed in Milwaukee.
