Vance, a venture capitalist whose best-selling memoir helped propel his 2022 ascent to the Senate, is a relative newcomer to politics, but has rapidly aligned himself with a faction of the GOP that most embraces Trump’s worldview.
Like the party’s standard-bearer, Vance says the West has exaggerated the threat posed by Vladimir Putin. He opposes sending more U.S. military aid to Ukraine and American foreign intervention in general, and has argued that Kyiv should pursue peace with Moscow even if that means ceding territory. China, he has said, is dangerous primarily because it threatens to outpace the United States as the world’s dominant economic power.
“This is a very smart and articulate guy. It’s all the more dangerous, because it’s very clear that he doesn’t really care about European security,” said Nathalie Tocci, a former adviser to European Union leaders who moderated an appearance by Vance at a gathering of the transatlantic foreign policy elite, the Munich Security Conference, earlier this year. “I remember being quite shocked the way he said, and repeated, that Putin does not represent an existential threat to Europe.”
Vance’s spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about his foreign policy views.
In speeches, the would-be heir apparent to Trump, who would be 82 years old at the end of a second term, has framed his positions as distinct from the peace-through-strength notion of U.S. foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades. As recently as May, Vance declared that such traditionalist foreign policy “seems to almost always be wrong.”
“We have to be open to new arguments,” he told an audience at the Quincy Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. If not, he added, “you are part of the problem, and we have to beat back the problem if we’re going to fix what’s going on in the country.”
The Iraq War, in which Vance served as an enlisted Marine, was particularly formative in the development of his worldview. A high school senior when the war started, Vance said he initially “believed the propaganda … that we needed to invade.” After deploying, however, he realized that the premise of the war was “a lie,” an experience that has influenced his skepticism of U.S. support for Ukraine, he said in an April speech on the Senate floor.
“It’s the same exact talking points 20 years later with different names,” Vance said of those lobbying to send more weapons to Ukraine.
“I do not think it is in America’s interests to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine,” he said a month later at the Quincy Institute.
Such statements have struck a nerve with his centrist Republican colleagues, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who last week said that such thinking exists only on “the fringes” of U.S. politics.
“I think he speaks for a certain section of the country who are, rightfully, fed up with wars that seem to last indefinitely … and I get that,” said one Republican congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about Trump’s choice of Vance. “But this is about a larger existential threat of Russia, not to Ukraine, but to the U.S. They and our other adversaries will view a victory by Putin as a defeat of the United States, no matter what happens now.”
Vance’s views on Ukraine and Russia put him to the right of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), another Trump ally who delayed sending additional aid to Ukraine this year but ultimately backed the measure. Johnson last week delivered a foreign policy address that hewed closer to the GOP’s Reagan-era ideals. He warned of Russia’s expansionist ambitions and said that while the Republican Party does not aspire to be “the world’s policeman,” it must be willing to “fight with the gloves off.”
Vance grew up in a part of rural Ohio that suffered from the decline in U.S. manufacturing and coal mining, fueling a frustration with the country’s flagging economic might that has also underpinned many of his foreign policy views.
He has said he opposes sending weapons and money to Ukraine in part because he thinks it degrades the United States’ ability to defend itself and meet its own industrial needs. His views on China stem from similar thinking.
“If there is something that should worry all of us,” he said during his speech at Quincy, it is not — at least not primarily — that Chinese aggression and influence are on rise in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and Africa. Rather, he said, “it’s that China, based [on] and because of the stupidity of Washington leaders over the past generation, is now arguably the most powerful industrial economy in the world.”
“If we’re going to lose a war, it will be because we have allowed our primary rival to become arguably our most powerful industrial competitor,” he added.
Vance’s isolationist streak stops with Israel, a foreign policy issue almost universally embraced across his party. He has been blunt about why.
“A big part of the reason why Americans care about Israel is because we are still the largest Christian majority country in the world, which means that 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,” Vance said in May.
Like Trump, who has said he has a “very good relationship” with Putin, Vance’s relative gentleness toward the Russian leader — he told fellow senators in April that Putin “is not Adolf Hitler” — has drawn some of the sharpest ire from colleagues.
But in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to strike a positive note on the prospects of a future Trump-Vance administration. When asked about it during a Monday news conference, Zelensky said “we will work together” and that he is not afraid of a Trump presidency.
There is a diversity of opinion in the Republican Party, he conceded. “But I want to tell you that the majority of the Republican Party supports Ukraine and the people of Ukraine.”
Others were less restrained. Oleh Symoroz, a Ukrainian war veteran and political activist, labeled Vance a “pro-Russian senator” and declared on social media that the Trump-Vance ticket was “a very negative” development for Ukraine.
Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has cultivated increasingly close ties with Putin to the chagrin of his fellow NATO members, appeared to welcome Vance’s assignment.
“A Trump-Vance administration sounds just right,” Balazs Orban, a top adviser to Orban, posted on X this week. He included a photograph of his arm around Vance’s shoulder during a recent congressional visit.
Kostiantyn Khudov and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.
