“”A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs,” Vance said in a Fox News interview at the Republican National Convention on Monday. “If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard, and that’s what [Trump] did when he took out [Iranian Gen. Qassem] Soleimani.”
Vance praised Trump for trying to “enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states” to fight back against Iran. In a speech to the Quincy Institute in May, Vance tried to sell a U.S.-Israeli-Arab alliance as a way for the United States to “spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.”
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Instead, Trump ended up overseeing a massive U.S. military buildup in the region during his term and nearly went to war with Iran.
Vance even wants to add another counterinsurgency to America’s “forever war” roster. In July 2023, he told NBC News that he would “empower the president of the United States, whether that’s a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels” in Latin America.
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Trump and Vance also share the establishment view that the United States needs to get ready for a conflict with China over Taiwan. At the convention, Vance told Fox News that China is the “biggest threat” to America, and he has voiced support for building up the Taiwanese military with American weapons in the past.”
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“The stance that puts Trump and Vance most at odds with the foreign policy establishment is their opposition to U.S. military aid for Ukraine. In a February speech to the Senate, Vance complained that the “experts have a new thing that American taxpayers must fund and must fund indefinitely, and it is called the conflict in Ukraine.” He has also written about the munitions shortages that the war is causing, a rare moment of honesty by a politician about the limits of U.S. power.
Vance told Fox News at the convention that Trump will “go in there, negotiate with the Russians and the Ukrainians, [and] bring this thing to a rapid close.” He also said that the war simply wouldn’t have started if Trump were in office. Yet in practice, Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine were just as hawkish as those of his successor. In fact, Trump was the first U.S. president to send weapons to Ukraine—a fact that he bragged about at the time.
And tellingly, at the presidential debate in June, Trump blamed President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan for causing the Ukrainian conflict. “He was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment,” Trump said. “When [Russian President Vladimir] Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to go in.'”
It’s not really an argument against war—just a promise to be better at it than the last guy.
Many Democrats and Republicans want to have their cake and eat it too. They know that Americans are fed up with endless military conflict, but they want to make their opponents look weak. Liberal criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy were just as incoherent as conservative criticisms of Biden’s foreign policy.
But wanting to win harder is not a strategy. And America’s problems are not simply a lack of gumption. Vance may be more willing to acknowledge the limits of U.S. power than his competition. When it comes to actually applying those insights, he falls far short.”