Vance, a venture capitalist whose best-selling autobiography fueled his 2022 Senate run, is a relative newcomer to politics but has quickly become part of the faction of the Republican Party most supportive of Trump’s worldview.
Like his party’s standard-bearer, Vance says the West has overstated the threat posed by President Vladimir Putin. He opposes expanded U.S. military aid to Ukraine and U.S. foreign intervention in general, and he says Kiev should pursue peace with Moscow even if it means ceding territory. He says China is dangerous mainly because it threatens to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy.
“He’s a very intelligent and eloquent man, and it’s all the more dangerous because it’s clear he doesn’t really care about European security,” said Natalie Tocci, a former adviser to European Union leaders who moderated Vance’s appearance at the Munich Security Conference, a gathering of the transatlantic foreign policy elite, earlier this year. “I remember being quite struck by how he repeatedly stated that Putin was not an existential threat to Europe.”
A spokesman for Vance did not immediately respond to a question about his foreign policy views.
In speeches, potential successors to Trump, who will be 82 at the end of his second term, have portrayed themselves as standing apart from the “peace through strength” concept of U.S. foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades. As recently as May, Vance declared that such a traditionalist foreign policy “almost always seems to be wrong.”
“We must be open to new discussions.” “If you’re not, then you’re part of the problem, and if we’re going to fix what’s going on in this country, we’ve got to fight back against that problem,” he told an audience at the Quincy Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Vance’s service in the Iraq War as a Marine was particularly influential in shaping his worldview. A high school senior when the conflict began, Vance said he initially “believed the propaganda that we needed to invade.” But after he was deployed, he realized the premise of the war was “a lie,” and that experience influenced his skepticism about U.S. aid to Ukraine, he said in a Senate floor speech in April.
“Twenty years later, the names are different, but the claims are exactly the same,” Vance said of those lobbying for more arms supplies to Ukraine.
“I don’t believe it’s in America’s interest to fund a virtually endless war in Ukraine,” he said a month later at the Quincy Institute.
Those comments have irritated some of his centrist Republican colleagues, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who said last week that such thinking only exists on the “fringes” of American politics.
“I think he speaks for a segment of the public that is tired of a war that seems to go on indefinitely. I get that,” said a Republican congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about Trump’s pick of Vance. “But this is about a larger existential threat from Russia — not just a threat to Ukraine, but a threat to the United States. Russia and other adversaries are going to view a Putin victory as a defeat for the United States, no matter what happens now.”
Vance’s views on Ukraine and Russia are to the right of those of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), another Trump ally who held up sending more aid to Ukraine this year but ultimately supported it. Last week, Johnson delivered a foreign policy speech that moved closer to the GOP’s Reagan-era ideals. He warned of Russia’s expansionist ambitions and said Republicans were not seeking to be the “world’s policeman” but must be prepared to “go hard.”
Vance grew up in rural Ohio, a state that suffered the decline of U.S. manufacturing and coal mining, and developed a frustration with the country’s fading economic strength that has influenced many of his foreign policy views.
Trump has said he opposes the supply of weapons and funds to Ukraine in part because he believes it weakens the U.S.’s ability to defend itself and meet its industrial needs, and his views on China stem from similar considerations.
“If there’s one thing we should all be worried about,” he said in his Quincy speech, it’s not, at least not primarily, that China’s growing aggression and influence in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and Africa. Rather, he said, “ Based in China [on] And thanks to the ineptitude of the last few generations of Washington leaders, the United States is now probably the most powerful industrial economy in the world.”
“If we lose the war, it will be because we have allowed our greatest rival to become perhaps our most powerful industrial competitor,” he added.
Vance’s isolationist tendencies stop at Israel, a foreign policy issue that nearly everyone in his party supports, and he has been outspoken about why.
“A “A big part of the reason Americans care about Israel is that we remain the largest Christian-majority country in the world, which means the majority of our people believe that their Messiah – and I consider myself a Christian – was born, died and rose again in that tiny piece of territory off the coast of the Mediterranean,” Vance said in May.
While Trump says he has a “very good relationship” with Putin, Vance’s relatively gentle approach to the Russian leader — he told fellow senators in April that Putin was “no Adolf Hitler” — has drawn the most ire from his colleagues.
But in Kiev, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sought to sound positive about the prospects of a future Trump-Vance administration. When asked about it at a press conference on Monday, Zelensky said “we will work together” and that he wasn’t afraid of a Trump presidency.
He acknowledged that there is diversity of opinion within the Republican Party, “but I would say that the vast majority of Republicans support Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.”
Others were less restrained, including Oleg Simoros, a Ukrainian military veteran and political activist who called Vance a “pro-Russian senator” and declared on social media that the Trump-Vance pairing was a “very negative” development for Ukraine.
Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has forged close ties with Putin despite discontent among NATO allies, appears to have welcomed Vance’s role.
“A Trump-Vance administration would be a perfect fit,” Orban’s top adviser, Balasz Orban, wrote on X this week, along with a photo of him with his arm around Vance’s shoulder during a recent visit to parliament.
Kostiantyn Khudov and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.
