Europe Should Prepare for President JD Vance

Foreign policy especially Europe will have been low on Donald Trump’s list of considerations, Europe should prepare for President JD Vance when deciding to anoint JD Vance as his running mate. The Ohio senator, a former detractor turned loyalist of the Republican nominee, is now close with Team Trump, and Team Trump rewards loyalty above all else.

JD Vance is also a populist and speaks to the very voters (white, non-graduate, rust belt) Trump must attract if he is to return to the Oval Office. Vance’s relationship with Trumpism has been a complicated one but his selection can be seen as a legacy pick that consolidates the Maga agenda’s hold on the Republican party for several more election cycles.

Europe Should Prepare for the Vice President JD Vance

Vance’s positions on world affairs are particularly striking in their departure from the crumbling bipartisan consensus on American global leadership. Although his shifting allegiances make his worldview difficult to pin down at times, he is, broadly speaking, an America First candidate who wishes to see the federal government more focused on America’s borders than those of other countries.

He repudiates neoconservatism and its assertion of the United States as a global Superman, dispatching frigates and fighter jets around the world to uphold truth, justice and the American way. Vance’s foreign policy philosophy may be characterised as a crude neorealism, combining the insights of Kenneth N. Waltz and subsequent scholars that international politics is defined by ‘anarchy, self-help, and power balancing’, with the grievance-laced message that liberal elites care more for the interests of foreigners and supranational institutions than for those of their fellow Americans.

The most concrete expression of this comes in Vance’s analysis of the Ukraine war. He considers it ‘ridiculous’ that the United States is ‘focused on this border in Ukraine’, stating: ‘I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.’ He has attempted to block US funding for the embattled European nation and calls Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering all Ukrainian territory ‘fantastical’. Vance has urged Ukraine to end its offensive military operations and commit to a defensive strategy that could ‘preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence’. A second term for Trump with Vance as his wingman would likely see an end to the strong, if belated, support given to Ukraine by the Biden administration. Deprived of American arms and money, it would be all but impossible for Zelensky to continue his country’s resistance to Russian occupation.

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While Vance is sometimes characterised as an isolationist, this isn’t quite right. His crude neorealism can be seen as a populist variant of the Monroe Doctrine, with the chief international policy of the United States being the maintenance of its spheres of influence – in Vance’s case economic spheres. He is a hawk on China, though not for liberal reasons of democracy, human rights and the upholding of international norms. He regards Beijing as both a threat to American hard power and Washington’s economic spheres of influence, with its goods and manufacturing dominance and its ability to disrupt shipping in the South China Sea. This dovetails neatly with Vance’s industrial policy outlook, which majors on the role of China in hollowing out Ohio’s manufacturing towns and his backing for tariffs. This is in line with Trump’s policy of slapping a 60 per cent import tax on all Chinese goods.

Vance goes beyond protectionism, though. He has framed his criticism of President Biden’s Ukraine policy in the context of Beijing’s threat to the Republic of China, telling Fox News that Washington is ‘stretched too thin’ to be ‘strong enough to push back against the Chinese,’ and that China will only be ‘dissuaded’ by the US ‘having the weapons necessary to prevent them from invading Taiwan’. Detractors will see this as a rhetorical sleight of hand, fully expecting the ideologically protean Vance to pivot elsewhere when Beijing invades its island neighbour, but there is an America First logic to his position.

It makes little difference to the US economy if Russia gobbles up Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe with it. Chinese annexation of Taiwan, which manufactures 90 per cent of the world’s advanced semiconductors, poses an unprecedented threat to global supply chains. Beijing could dangle the threat of a digital Dark Age over Western nations unwilling to bend to its will. Of course, the counterpoint to this is: if you think America arming Ukraine against Russia is a futile exercise, just wait till you’re trying to keep Taipei stocked up on Patriot missiles against the People’s Liberation Army.

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Vance’s regional spheres approach would also have major implications for the Middle East. He visited Israel for the first time in 2022, a customary pilgrimage for Republican presidential candidates, but he speaks about the Jewish state in a different way to earlier generations of American right-wingers. Rather than seeing a common providence in Zionism and the American founding, one articulated in shared democratic and civilisational ideals, Vance speaks of intersecting interests and a more transactional alliance. The Israeli right is relaxed, and even enthusiastic, about this shift because it is accompanied by statements on Gaza like: ‘The Israelis are our allies, let them prosecute the war the way they see fit.’

But Vance has also said the priority is to ‘get this war over and as quickly as possible’ so the US can facilitate an Israeli-Sunni alliance to maintain regional stability, a proposition he outlined in a speech to the uber-realist Quincy Institute in May. The biggest roadblock to such an alliance is the question of a Palestinian state, a priority in the Sunni street if not in the Sunni palaces but one which would require Israel to hand over strategically vital territory to the Palestinians and hope they don’t use it to launch another 7 October style attack. There is a danger that Republican Middle East policy comes to join its Democrat counterpart in seeing Israeli intransigence as the obstacle to peace. The Israeli right might come to regret its embrace of outwardly pro-Israel realism.

However, for the themes undergirding Vance’s foreign policy are self-interest and self-reliance. He objects to US funding for Ukraine because ‘we should be focused on our problems’ rather than ‘subsidising European security’. European nations had already begun to step up defence expenditure in response to the Trump administration’s Nato scepticism. Whether or not the Trump-Vance ticket is victorious in November, the direction of travel is clear: the Republican Party no longer sees it as America’s responsibility to foot the bill for a continent that directs its resources to social spending rather than defence. Europe will have to re-examine spending priorities and make some painful decisions.

US vice presidential candidates seldom matter all that much, even at home. A VP is a constitutional understudy, a ginner-up of the party’s base and a lightning rod for the other side’s voters. Vance is unusual for a VP candidate in that his mere selection poses fundamental, long-term challenges to settled policy on multiple continents. World capitals are already preparing for another Trump presidency. They should prepare for an eventual Vance presidency too.