Trump and Vance’s foreign policy is another war disguised as anti-war policy

Judging by the headlines, one might think that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance are out to overthrow the national security apparatus.

“Trump’s decision for Vance widens the rift in the old foreign policy guard,” reported Bloomberg.

“Trump’s election as Vice President means a catastrophe for Europe and Ukraine,” complained Politico.

Yet despite Trump’s rhetoric about “endless wars” and Vance’s attacks on “neoconservatives,” the two politicians are fully engaged in some of the establishment’s most destructive military adventures. And in some ways, Trump and Vance are even more belligerent than they initially suggested.

“A lot of people are realizing we need to do something about Iran — but not these weak little bombings,” Vance said Monday in an interview with Fox News at the Republican National Convention. “If you want to hit the Iranians, you have to hit them hard, and that’s exactly what (Trump) did when he took out (Iranian General Qassem) Soleimani.”

Vance praised Trump for trying to “empower 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 an alliance between the US, Israel and the Arab states as a way for the US to “spend less time and fewer resources in the Middle East.”

Yet it is precisely this strategy that has brought us to this situation in the first place, and the proof is in the air. Trump’s shows of force against Iran have not definitively ended the US-Iran conflict, nor have the Abraham Accords persuaded Israel and the Arab states to close the military gap.

Instead, during his time in office, Trump oversaw a massive US military buildup in the region and nearly got into war with Iran.

Vance even wants to add another counterinsurgency measure to America’s “forever war.” In July 2023, he told NBC News that he would “authorize the president of the United States, whether Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels in Latin America.”

Washington is already heavily involved in the drug war in the region and supports Latin American military and border troops. Last year, several Republican candidates – including Trump himself – called for the United States to invade Mexico directly.

Trump and Vance also share the establishment view that the United States must prepare for conflict with China over Taiwan. At the convention, Vance told Fox News that China is the “biggest threat” to America, and he has previously advocated building up Taiwan’s military with American weapons.

To his credit, Vance considers the risks of escalation a little more carefully than other China hawks. “As a father of three young children, I really don’t want to go to war with a country that makes all of our antibiotics,” he said in his speech at the Quincy Institute. “So maybe the neoconservatives should put the brakes on for at least 10 years.”

The position that most distinguishes Trump and Vance from the foreign policy elite is their opposition to U.S. military aid to Ukraine. In a speech to the Senate in February, Vance complained that the “experts have a new thing that the American taxpayers have to fund, indefinitely, and it’s called the conflict in Ukraine.” He has also written about the ammunition shortages the war is causing – a rare moment of honesty from a politician about the limits of U.S. power.

Vance told Fox News at the convention that Trump would “go out and negotiate with the Russians and the Ukrainians and get this thing over with quickly.” He also said the war simply would not have started if Trump were in office. But in practice, Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine were just as warmongering as those of his successor. In fact, Trump was the first U.S. president to send weapons to Ukraine – a fact he boasted about at the time.

And tellingly, at the presidential debate in June, Trump blamed the Ukraine conflict on President Joe Biden’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. “He was so bad on Afghanistan, it was such a terrible embarrassment,” Trump said. “When (Russian President Vladimir) Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to invade.'”

This is not a real argument against war, but only a promise to be better at it than the last.

Many Democrats and Republicans want the best of both worlds. They know that Americans are tired of endless military conflicts, but they want to make their opponents look weak. The liberal criticism of Trump’s foreign policy has been just as incoherent as the conservative criticism of Biden’s foreign policy.

But forcing victory is not a strategy. And America’s problems are not simply a lack of guts. Vance is perhaps more willing than his competitors to acknowledge the limits of US power. When it comes to actually applying those lessons, he falls far short.