The Contradictions of J.D. Vance's Foreign Policy

In the abstract, Vance's foreign policy makes sense. The world isn't abstract, however.

It is tempting to sum up and dismiss J.D. Vance’s foreign policy with one word: he’s an isolationist. That’s too simple. More importantly, it’s not convincing. Suppose he is an isolationist: is that really so bad? Why is it bad? How do you go about convincing the American people it’s bad? In order to refute the real weaknesses in Vance’s philosophy, we need to begin by reconstructing it fairly. It turns out that Vance is probably better described as a realist. His realism, though, contains at least three defects. First, it rests on nonexistent tradeoffs. Second, it fails on its own terms, because it does not correctly advance and identify American interests. Finally, it is amoral in ways that might be theoretically justifiable in the abstract, but contradict the more admirable elements of Vance’s postliberalism. 

Vance’s theory of foreign policy seems to contain three main strands: resource scarcity, prioritization of material American interests over ideological commitments, and a belief in a foreign-domestic tradeoff. 

First, Vance doesn’t think that America can do it all. He wants Europe to rebuild its defense industries and spend more on rearmament, and he has called for Taiwan to do the same. More importantly, he thinks America should prioritize the Middle East over Europe, and east Asia over the Middle East. But he sounds quite aggressive in the latter two theatres, and willing to use military force against Iran or China (over Taiwan)—not the mark of a true isolationist. 

Vance ranks these priorities based on his assessment of America’s strategic interests. Sometimes he uses moral language to describe them. For example, he has criticized American interventions in the Middle East for harming local Christian communities, and he thinks that region matters to America for reasons that are partly ideological: “A majority of citizens of this country think that their savior, and I count myself a Christian, was born, died, and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory off the Mediterranean. The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous.” “You can't totally divorce the moral apparatus here, even in a realist foreign policy,” he later added, because “Americans want their values reflected in the types of things that they do.” 

Most of the time, though, he describes interests in amoral, material terms. He has criticized a “focus on moralism over practical policies.” At the Munich Security Conference, he argued that Putin doesn’t present an existential threat to Europe—and, by implication, not such a threat to the United States, either. Putin is not a “kind and friendly person,” but “the fact that he’s a bad guy does not mean that we can’t engage in basic diplomacy and prioritizing American interests.” Those interests, he argued, favored East Asia. It is presumably on account of this preference for a practical, unemotional approach, that he said, just before the 2022 Russian invasion, “I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another[.]”

But Vance contrasted his unconcern for Ukraine with his care for America: “I do care about the fact that in my community right now the leading cause of death among 18-45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl that's coming across the southern border.” That’s the last core tenet of Vancean foreign policy—a special version of resource scarcity that posits trade-offs between foreign and domestic goals. 

His foreign policy, in other words, is not just “isolationism,” and in the abstract is not absurd. It even sounds sophisticated. But troubles crop up immediately upon closer examination. 

Resource scarcity, in the abstract, is a real problem for the United States. At current levels of spending and production, we do face trade-offs between Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific. But the foreign-domestic tradeoff Vance emphasizes makes very little sense, because he tends to combine things that lack any logical connection. None of the resources we send to Ukraine have anything to do with the southern border, nor will old military vehicles take fentanyl off the streets of Philadelphia.

More importantly, our defense spending, and almost all our foreign commitments, largely lack any domestic trade-offs. Weapons spending is a boon to the American economy, and often especially helps blue-collar workers in flyover country. We lose nothing by putting soldiers in Kaiserslautern rather than Nebraska. And our spending on defense does not contribute appreciably to the budget deficit: it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the social programs that present our real fiscal issue. So “walking and chewing gum” sometimes presents a problem when “walking” is one foreign security threat and “chewing gum” another, but not when we take walks at home and chew gum abroad. 

That leads us to the second problem: Vance wants to be a realist, but he does not correctly assess American interests, and he does not correctly calibrate means to ends. Consider our commitment to Europe. NATO expansion, and a continued heavy American military presence, was not primarily intended, until a few years ago, as a deterrent to Russia. It was, instead, about balance-of-power politics. Germany got reunification and consequent economic pre-eminence, but ceded political leadership of an increasingly integrated European community to the French, while the American security umbrella obviated any need for rearmament or military rivalry. It was a scheme designed to unite the Europeans and prevent a re-run of the early 20^th century in the absence of a common Soviet foe. It is not likely that the last two years have rendered decades of strategic worries obsolete. 

Besides, America has a strong economic interest in preserving a stable, free, and unipolar international order. Success requires some degree of international confidence in America’s commitment to freedom generally and to its allies in particular. The last two administrations have a very bad track record of abandoning allies in Syria and Afghanistan. A betrayal of Ukraine would dwarf those two failures: it is fair to say that America’s status as leader of the free world would be permanently damaged or destroyed.  That is not moralism or pie-in-the-sky thinking—America’s economic interests rest, in part, on ideological ones. 

But Vance’s amoralism is not just strategically shortsighted. It also clashes with his postliberalism. The strongest and most interesting critique of liberalism is its alleged failure to account for or promote virtue. Liberalism, the argument goes, is unacceptably neutral between good and evil: license and immorality are unavoidable outcomes. Some of the best postliberals I know adopt that ideology because they care deeply about goodness. Of course Vance might say that he cares about virtue in America, and that it is the duty of any government to prioritize the wellbeing of its own citizens. Fair enough. But prioritizing the wellbeing of Americans in hard cases is not the same as a categorical barrier to morality in foreign policy. It’s not clear why America should care about the pursuit of goodness at home, but favor a self-consciously amoral version of realism abroad.

And it is not clear why America, or Vance, would want to do that. Vance was right to say that “Americans want their values reflected in the types of things that they do,” but that extends to Ukraine, not just Israel. Americans want to be the good guys. They prefer freedom to tyranny. They do not like Vladimir Putin. Vance’s Ukraine comments sound callous, small-minded, and mean-spirited. They demonstrate no sense of any special calling or of American destiny or greatness. Nobody is calling for a return to the first Bush administration—but Vance’s notion of America on the world stage is a sad and dispiriting one. Virtue—especially for a postliberal—should not end at the water’s edge.

Jonathan Meilaender is a JD candidate at Harvard Law and is concurrently engaged in a Master’s program in German and European studies at Georgetown University. He received his BA in Politics from Saint Vincent College where he was also Editor-in-Chief of the Saint Vincent College Review. @JMeilaender